Maus

            I’m reading “Maus” by Art Spiegelman. The book is a graphic novel about Spiegelman’s father, Valdek and the story of how he survived the holocaust in Poland. In the book the Jews are portrayed as mice, the Nazis as cats and the Poles as pigs.

           

Some things I’ve noticed about the book so far are how careful and different Valdek is as an old man after the holocaust and before it. After the holocaust when he is telling his son the story he tells he to finish everything of his plate. Most parents do this but he is especially strict. In the book Art says that he father wouldn’t let him leave the table if he didn’t clear his plate and sometimes Art went to bed without a meal. I think Valdek knows the importance of food after his time in Poland during the holocaust. He spent time in a prisoner of war camp before the concentration camp and there too he was starved. In some parts of Poland the Nazis did not allow food into towns and the people would starve. In concentration camps they were given nothing but stale bread and slop. Valdek is also hostile towards his second wife Mala and I think it is because his first wife Anja committed suicide after she was freed from a concentration camp.

           

There are a lot of philosophical questions that come up in the book and from the holocaust. Some of mine are, what drives one race to obliterate another? I think that Hitler needed someone to blame for WW1. Germany was scared, broken and angry and all they needed was someone to take it out on. But they did in the cruelest way possible. How can you have no guilt for torturing, beating, killing and starving people just for their religion or sexual orientation? One of my questions pertains more to Valdeks story, what drove Anja to kill herself? I think it was more then the concentration camps. She was depressed before the war started. She lost her son in the war, but she had another after. She survived hell on earth but couldn’t live anymore and I was wondering why.

My book club and I are reading “Maus” by Art Spiegelman, which is the true story of a holocaust survivor. I noticed so far in the book that Valdek changed a lot after the war and you can see it in the way he acts around his family. I also have a lot of philosophical questions about the book and the holocaust.