Maus: Part Two

A lot of Holocaust survivor stories come down to a few good snap decisions and a lot of luck. So many people escaped death at the hands of the Nazis because they just happened to avoid getting caught one night or because they made a friend before the war who was willing to help them when the Gestapo came to town. For Vladek Spiegelman, that was exactly the case. The second half of My Father Bleeds History, the first of two trade paperback compilations of Maus, consists of Vladek watching his family dwindle before his eyes as the antisemitic laws in Poland become more ruthless and the Nazi extermination plan becomes more bald-faced.

There's an old saying, "No one really survived the Holocaust". In so many survivor's narratives, there is no jubilation at the end, no feeling of victory. The reality of the experience for so many people was that they had been stripped of their humanity by not just the Nazi party but by whole societies they once called home. Though many of them went on to make new lives, start families and rejoin the human race, the scars they acquired in the ghettos and concentration camps never went away. This is what happened to Anna Spiegelman, Maus writer and artist Art Spiegelman's mother. In 1968 she took her own life, an event Art Spiegelman captured in one of his early comics, Prisoner on the Hell Planet. That comic appears in the middle of Part I of Maus in full.

Anna's suicide puts a fine point on the emotional impact of the Holocaust on those who lived through it. According to Vladek's telling, which is the basis for most of what we see in Maus, Anna barely made it out of the war as it was. She shows early signs of mental breakdown as she and Vladek escape from town to town, hiding in the forests, barns and coal-filled basements of Poland in the year prior to being captured and sent to the Auschwitz death camp. Before Anna and Vladek are caught by the Gestapo they experience the killing or capture of their parents, siblings, cousins and even their son Richieu. At the moment when they learn of their son's death, Vladek speaks the lines that best capture the essence of the Jewish experience during the Holocaust: "To die, it's easy. But you have to struggle for your life! Until the very last moment we must struggle together."

Also running through the narrative of Maus is the natural end of Vladek's life several years later in New York. He suffers from heart disease and the very same stubborn, stingy attitude that helped him survive the war. Interwoven in Vladek's harrowing story of survival is Art's own search for the last vestiges of his mother's existence. He begs his father for Anna's journals and tries to connect with his step mother Mala. Art Spiegelman certainly did record a very detailed, important account of the Holocaust, but he also made sure to include the fact that there's so much more that was lost and will never be recovered.