WWII was one of the darkest times in human history. One main reason behind that was the Holocaust, a terrible event of the past where millions lost their lives to a sad, “hollow cause”. Maus I and II is a two part graphic novel depicting the story of one survivor of the Holocaust named Vladek Spiegelman, told through his son Art Spiegelman in a cartoon fashion where the pictures are as saddening as the words.
The story of Vladek Spiegelman begins in 1937, where Vladek is a small-time textile salesman in Zawiercie. He marries the love of his life, Anja Zylberberg, and they both live in Sosnowiec for a few years. Then after seeing Nazi propaganda coming too close to home, Vladek is drafted into the army, and is ironically captured as a war prisoner by Nazi soldiers. After about a year of being imprisoned, he manages to come home only to be welcomed to the sight that his hometown is now a Nazi run ghetto for Jews of all Poland. Tensions rise, violence begins to erupt, and Vladek and his family are now forced into hiding for the next two years, alternating from place to place with little belongings with them. Then in March of 1944, they believe to have found a way to escape the Europe that Hitler had created, which was to flee to turkey and then to the U.S; sadly for Vladek and Anja they were captured and sent to the gates of Auschwitz, the most infamous concertation camp in all of Poland.
For starters, Maus can only be appropriately characterized as a remarkable piece of literature. Often when a story is dictated in the form of a comic, which is how Maus is, people have a hesitance towards it because they believe that it will not have any character depth or meaningful plot, but that is not the case here. It is the one exception to that belief since it is “An epic story told in tiny pictures” (New York Times). Due to its pictures, the story is told in an honest fashion, up to the very last detail. The morbid faces filled with terror and despair, the scenery of Poland at the time and how the Nazis had dishonored it, is depicted as it was and always will be. This is something that a typed story would not portray adequately due to us formulating our own perspective.
Morality and empathy are the driving force between Maus’s success. Maus is “A brutally moving work of art” (Boston Globe) because it incorporates morality and the very fiber of human emotion into its story through rich dialog and striking pictures. While Spiegelman recounts his father’s story verbatim, he crafted the artwork with ominous livelihood. Portraying the characters as animals adds the analogy of predator and prey. The captivating facial expressions display all forms of human emotion, like distress, anguish, and exhaustion, with empathetic detail that engages you to the book wholeheartedly, making Maus alluring success.
Maus is a story like no other: an intriguing survivor story communicated in a unique way. This novel suits those who want to learn about history, about how the human character can be summited to so much pain, yet can surpass it with commendable bravery.