Maus: A Comic Book About The Holocaust

This year I have set myself the challenge to read 52 books in 2022 or one book a week. This is a decent challenge but I am very excited about it!

Book number 17 was my first comic book in this challenge: Maus by Art Spiegelman, who turned his fathers' story of the holocaust into a comic book.

Source

The Story

The story is not that of the writer, Art Spiegelman, but of his father Vladek Spiegelman, a Jewish survivor of the horrors of Nazi deathcamps. Vladek lives a happy life in the Czech Republic where he finds love and starts a family. All seems to be well but war is catching up with them. Vladek will have to rely on all his ingenuiety to try to make it out alive.

Source

The beauty of the story lies in that it does not just tell the story of Vladek and the holocaust, but also the story of how his son Art, the writer, tries to deal with his ageing father and his trauma. Art hopes to get closer to his father and closer to understanding the mystery of something as horrid as Auschwitz. He tries to do this by writing down his fathers story now that he is still alive. He also tries to come to terms with his own childhood that was sometimes made difficult by his father who had traumas from the camps.

The Comic

This book is of course so special because it is a comic book. It portrays the jews as mice, the nazi's as cats and the Polish as pigs. By making these groups into animals it makes the story clear and more impactful. It clearly shows that the racism of World War II makes no sense, by clearly showing the mice being murdered at the hands of the cats. But at the same time it also cleverly shows people caught in the middle, like the Polish pigs. It throws up the age old question of would you do the right thing if it could cost your life?

I really loved this comic book. I think it showed both the story of Vladek and the holocaust as well as that of his son Art really well. I would really recommend this read!