Maus II: A Survivor's Tale: And Here My Troubles Began

This comic really drives home the horrors that people faced in prisoner camps. It makes you think really hard about how easily that anyone can end up here. Really eye-opening.

How can a teacher teach in this age where moving images on a screen are so compelling, and cell phones interrupt everything? Part of the answer is that if you have a compelling graphic book, it will be a better teaching tool than anything on TV or the internet. I bought this book because it is real history, unfolding before the readers eyes. It's a story of a son's love for his father. It's a story about a political system which became a death machine, rolling across Europe. It's a story about things that really happened. Has anyone noticed this? We live in an age that is a book-buyer's market. If you are a reader, you can buy a man's life work for fractions of pennies on the dollar of it's true value. This book is excellent on every level that you look at it. I recommend this book to anyone who wants a personal account of history as it pertains to the USA and World War II.

Although Maus provides some useful insights into camp live, the best descriptions of that are to be found in the memoirs of Levi and Wiesel and in the "Genocide" segment of the BBC's World at War series. Maus is really about survival, its true costs, and about how the children of survivors and in a larger sense all of us are survivors of the Holocaust burdened by collective guilt and owing a debt to past and future generations. The graphic novel technique allows Spiegelman to tell several tales at once -- it's not just the Auschwitz narrative that is important, but the current effects of the experience on Spiegelman's father Vladek, mother Anja, and on Spiegelman himself. The book ends with Vladek exhausted, saying good night, in a Freudian slip, to "Richieu", Spiegelman's older brother who died in the Holocaust. This is a fitting image, capturing the direct loss of the Holocaust as well as the cost to guilt ridden survivors like Vladek and succeeding generations who could never quite measure up to the memory of the victims. The most striking images in the book are two photographs: one of the beautiful and angelic Richieu and another of Vladek as a young man in a crisp camp uniform. Vladek was a striking and charismatic figure, who survived on the basis of quick wits mixed in with considerable luck. Had there been no Holocaust, he would have been a fabulously successful industrialist and entrepreneur. But surviving the Holocaust cost him his previous life and reduces him, tragically, to a pathetic figure who guilts his son into seeing him by making up a heart attack, who drives his current wife crazy, who becomes a caricature of the miserly Jew whose cheapness is maddening. The most moving and redeeming quality of Vladek is his love for his first wife Anja, who also survived the Holocaust owing in considerable part to the help and resourcefulness of Vladek. Yet, she commits suicide 25 years later, much like Primo Levi. Vladek destroys her journals in a fit of grief, and it is this loss that haunts the book. The mystery of Anja's death is never addressed or resolved. This is a complex and moving work.

This book certainly takes one of the most interesting approaches to the telling of one of histories saddest and most important stories. Using cartoons, the main characters are portrayed as humans with the head of a mouse. The origin of this representation is an article in a Pomeranian(German) newspaper in the 1930's. That article railed against the American cartoon figure of Mickey Mouse and the Jewish brutalization of people. It is a story of a survivor of the holocaust who is now aged and wants his son to come visit him. This leads to a retelling of the old man's experiences of being rounded up as a Jew and forced into the concentration camps. With survival their primary thought, there were still acts of kindness although most were motivated by a spirit of self-preservation. While in the camps, he worked at many jobs, his survival was as much due to his skills as it was random chance. After the war, he eventually emigrated to American and lived a quiet life, although his experiences were a part of his daily life. It never ceases to amaze me how it is possible that there are people who still doubt the reality of the holocaust. Perhaps it is due to the fact that it is so hard to believe that a nation would simply round up millions of people and simply kill them. In any case, this book is yet another way to tell a true story that cannot be repeated too often or too forcefully. We must never forget this epic story of brutality towards people for no reason other than they were not of the right type.

When I realized that the Pulitzer-prize winning book was a comic book, I nearly put it back on the shelf. Oh sure, I love comics, even "serious" ones like Asterix and Obelix.But there seemed to be something sacrilegious about writing the story of Holocaust survivors in this genre. Like walking on a grave. Or touching a Torah scroll with bare hands.So I read it once, and again. An onion, this book is an onion. You peel away one layer only to discover another, and another, and you try in vain to remember what it is that keeps you from crying when you peel an onion.There is immense pain buried here, agony. The simplicity of Spiegelman's text reminds me a little of Isaac Babel, who wrote of the horrors of the Russian revolution in just as understated a tone. No exaggeration, no padding. After all, how can you pad such awful facts? How can you exaggerate evil?MAUS is an adult book. Yet bravehearted parents could likely use it as a read-aloud with older children, if they are willing to tackle honest questions and not duck reality. It could be a family experience to remember. If the adults are well equipped with raw courage.After all, Art Spiegelman was.

If literature is writing that changes us, then Maus I and II certainly qualify. Maus I brings us through the first act, leading us to the gates of Auschwitz before breaking for intermission. Here, now, is the terrifying second act, in which we enter those gates. Mr. Spiegelman continues his father's biography in the same high quality fashion, skillfully merging picture and text, often making his strongest statements in what he chooses not to say. Maus II is powerful, moving, final. With Maus I, it is a must read for anyone wanting to understand the Jewish experience under Hitler.