Maus

Pavel the shrink asks Art whether he admires Vladek for surviving the war, and when Art admits that he does, Pavel tells the author to consider whether those who died are not equally admirable. Pavel asserts that surviving the Holocaust was ultimately random: Crediting survivors for their fortitude and resourcefulness, in Pavel’s view, means implicitly placing blame on those who died. Many events in Maus support this view, though Vladek himself may interpret them differently. Ultimately, the story Art tells makes clear that both resourcefulness and luck played an instrumental role in Vladek’s survival.

A key feature of Vladek’s character as a young man is his resourcefulness and his willingness to take risks. In many ways, these traits aid Vladek in surviving the horrors of Auschwitz. Vladek never hesitates to use the skills he has to his advantage, quickly aware that getting through each day at the camp requires both looking out for one’s own best interest and manipulating the system that has been put in place. Repeatedly, Vladek takes it upon himself to volunteer for tasks or work positions that he knows will give him a leg up, so to speak, when it comes to his survival. While others are careful not to draw attention to themselves, for example, Vladek deliberately volunteers to give English lessons to one of the SS guards. In his unique position of speaking both Polish and English—as well as knowing some German—Vladek learns that he is valuable to the guards. Likewise, he never hesitates to volunteer for a task that will earn him special favor and extra food: Though he has no experience in several of the jobs he takes on—such as tin work and shoemaking—he asserts that he does, knowing that he is a quick study and that, with his drive, he can convince the Nazis otherwise. This willingness to take risks is instrumental to Vladek’s survival.

Vladek has several advantages at the beginning of the war. He is a healthy, diligent man with a talent for linguistics, bartering, and craftsmanship. He marries into a wealthy family, giving him more valuables to trade with for food and shelter. He has connections to the authorities on both his and Anja’s side of the family that facilitate his escape from early roundups. He avoids immediate death at Auschwitz because he is not too old to work, and he avoids serious disease until the very end of his imprisonment.

However, these advantages ultimately don’t mean much. The Nazis “finish out” ghettos by killing collaborators in the Jewish police and councils (111). Anja’s millionaire parents could not escape from Auschwitz. Vladek survives several close scares with Nazi soldiers and antisemitic neighbors. This includes a point when a notorious killer spares him because Haskel is a gambling buddy. There is no strategy or personality trait that’s more conducive to survival: Vladek prides himself on self-reliance, but Anja survives despite her frail condition by maintaining friendships. Haskel and Miloch spend the rest of the war in hiding, while Lolek willingly goes to Auschwitz and comes out the other side. Vladek is right about placing Richieu into hiding earlier but wrong in trusting the smugglers.

Vladek tries to give the chaos some sense of order. He extols the values of saving, avoiding vices like cigarettes, and learning new skills. He points out stories of Jewish people who try to bribe the soldiers and pay for it with their lives. Art tells Pavel that he sees Vladek as lucky but also “amazingly present-minded and resourceful” (205). For Vladek, both luck and resourcefulness are necessary.

Vladek maintains an optimistic and hopeful spirit throughout his time at Auschwitz. He suffers a brief bout of doubt and discouragement when he is initially incarcerated, but after a priest insists his inmate tattoo contains lucky numbers, Vladek becomes determined to remain alive. He focuses on his love for his wife, Anja, and by keeping her in his thoughts, he remains mentally strong. Helping Anja survive by smuggling food and letters, in turn, gives Vladek further motivation to survive because he knows that Anja is counting on him. Though the conditions in Auschwitz are designed to kill all of its inmates eventually, Vladek continuously evades starvation and serious physical punishment and is able to remain alive. His noble spirit and willingness to proactively take steps to protect his best interests are indispensable. Art points out, however, as he wrestles with his dissonant thoughts about writing the book, that survival does not mean that those who did not survive were unworthy of life or that the time of those who ultimately lived was any easier. A degree of luck and chance is at play in who lives and who perishes.

The experiences Vladek endured while imprisoned at Auschwitz impacted the rest of his life irrevocably. While he survived despite all odds, the book points to the ways that trauma continues to shape Vladek’s character and his interactions with others and the world. Some of the results of Vladek’s experiences are relatively innocuous, albeit frustrating for Art, such as his frugality and insistence on saving items of little value for fear they will one day prove valuable or useful. However, one of the most adverse effects of Vladek’s trauma is the way it impacts his son Art. Art is both angered and frustrated by his inability to live up to the expectations (and demands) his father conveyed when Art was growing up. Art’s success was hugely important to Vladek, but he deemed Art’s career choice as an unworthy one. Art grows up feeling like a failure in the eyes of his father and, in turn, their relationship only becomes more and more strained.

Vladek insists he loves Art, but Art has difficulty seeing past the hurt that Vladek has caused him. This hurt and pain is the trauma of Vladek’s experience being passed down to Art. Though Art did not experience the Holocaust directly, he is impacted by it as a child of two survivors. He speaks of this to Françoise, telling her that on some level he wishes he could have experienced Auschwitz so he could understand what his parents went through. The guilt that Art feels is similar to survivor’s guilt—the guilt felt by those who survive a horrific event while others do not. This guilt is a vicious one, born out of good intentions, compassion, and a desire to be empathetic, which creates a cycle of torment and feelings of shame. Art’s guilt is complicated by the fact that his older brother, Richieu, who did not survive the war, casts a shadow over Art, who believes that Richieu would have made choices that pleased his parents more.

Vladek, too, experiences survivor’s guilt; this is evident at various points during his recounting of his experiences in Auschwitz, but especially as he looks through photographs of his many friends and relatives who died in Auschwitz or other camps. Vladek is grateful to have survived, but the rest of his life is tinged with the guilt that others who were killed were just as worthy of survival as he was. Any happiness he can find in life after Auschwitz is tainted by these feelings.  

The present-day Vladek is stingy and manipulative. He hoards random freebies, picks up wires off the road, and sneaks into a nearby hotel while in the Catskills. He brings up his past to get a store manager to refund his used groceries and feigns health troubles to get attention. While he treasures his memories of Anja, he treats his second wife poorly: He acts like she’s his nurse and only gives her a small allowance. Art resents being the mediator of their fights and the notion that he will have to take care of Vladek after Mala leaves.

If this Vladek is at odds with the selfless person he portrays in his story, it is important to recognize that a traumatic event like war does not make a person more heroic or teach them lessons. The encounter with the hitchhiker shows that he is not immune to prejudice despite living through one of the worst acts of prejudice in history. Surviving genocide and war can inflict a person with a lifetime of trauma. Vladek loses his first son, most of his family, and many friends to the Holocaust. According to Pavel, Vladek responds to this survivor’s guilt by pouring his efforts into Art, who cannot meet his expectations. Losing Anja sends him into a spiral of depression that leads him to destroy her diaries—a symbol of their shared trauma. As with Art, Vladek tries to recreate the relationship with Mala, who looks like Anja, but he ultimately cannot trust her.

While Art grows up after World War II, he still experiences the scars of the Holocaust as his parents and many of their friends are survivors. As a child, he has nightmares about dying in gas chambers and choosing which parent to keep, and he initially believes that all adults moan in their sleep as Vladek does. He stays in a mental health facility, and he depicts himself in an Auschwitz uniform in “Prisoner on the Hell Planet.” Art also feels that none of his struggles compare to his parents’ ordeal, but Pavel reassures him. He calls Art “the REAL survivor” because no Holocaust victim truly escapes the anguish of that event (204).