Maus: Part One

In the modern Jewish community, there is often talk of what will happen when there are no more living Holocaust survivors. Will those stories be lost? Will the world forget the full intensity of pain, degradation and atrocity of that dark period in history? With that very worry in mind, several writers have endeavored to record the stories of survivors so future generations will never forget what happened to the millions who suffered under Nazi oppression during the Second World War. There is at least one great story of the Holocaust in every medium. In film there is Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List, in literature there is Elie Wiesel's Night and even in comic books there is Art Spiegelman's Maus.

Maus is Art Spiegelman's way of committing his father Vladek's experience in WWII era Poland to memory. Based on several conversations Art had with his father in the 1970's, the comic first appeared in the underground comic Funny Aminals in 1972. A few years later when Spiegelman and his wife Francoise Mouly created the highly influential pop art magazine RAW, he decided to expand the Maus comic into a full-length story that was serialized over the course of eleven years in RAW and then compiled into two trade paperbacks in the early 1990's. The series eventually won the Pulitzer Prize for its unique depiction of the events leading up to and during the Holocaust.

Maus is so named because Spiegelman depicts the various ethnicities in the book as various animals, the Jews being mice. Many of the ethnicity/animal pairings have symbolic meaning. Jews are depicted as mice because, as far as Nazi propaganda and larger society was concerned during the Holocaust, Jews were considered vermin that were meant to be exterminated. Appropriately, the Nazis who attempted to kill such vermin are depicted as cats, whereas the Polish people who played host to so many concentration camps are depicted as pigs.

The first few chapters of Maus find a rodent version of Art Spiegelman visiting his elderly father to pry stories of his wartime experience out of him. It is a familiar story to anyone who has listened to the trials of those who lived through the atrocity in Europe. Vladek describes a comfortable, if simple middle-class life of honest work and marriage prospects punctuated with strange, often second-hand news of new laws restricting the lives of Jews in Germany, Austria and, after the German invasion, Poland. All of these preliminary prejudices are interspliced with the mundane details of Vladek's attempts to have something like a normal life as an all-consuming war loomed on the horizon.

The most striking part of these early chapters is how Vladek's experience in the Polish army explains the first shots of World War II. A young Vladek fights in a woefully under-trained, ill-equipped army that can't hope to stand up to the German war machine that all too easily divides Poland into a "Reich" and a "Protectorate", just two chunks of land that will soon experience the same laws even though they are called something different. Spiegelman shows us the precursors to the concentration camps that have since become iconic of the Holocaust, the draconian rules that pull a noose ever tighter around not just a people, but a whole continent. But the POW camps where Vladek spends the early part of the war will soon look like paradise compared to the likes of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen.