The Hidden Story - Maus

Maus I

Response

Annie Kominek

While I am not a comic book/graphic novel fan in general, I find that a few graphic novels to capture my attention and I cannot put them down. Deathnote is one; Maus has now been added to that extremely short list.

Maus tells two stories: one about a man’s trials trying to learn about his father’s life during the Nazi era in Poland, and the other about a man living in Poland before and during the Nazi occupation of Poland.  The author and artist, Art Spiegelman, takes us on a journey of his father’s life,  from the days before the Holocaust to his imprisonment in a concentration camp.

What I love most about this book is that it gives us two major stories, only one of which we may be aware of. The first story is his father’s  life in Poland, but the second is the story of a survivor. What some may just read as the comic relief or intermission between the real story, the panels that depict Art’s father, Vladek, as a penny-pinching and unique survivor. It tells his story in a unique way; all the pills he has to take, the tension between him and his wife, Mala, and the suicide of his first wife and Art’s mother, Anja. Each survivor has a different reaction to the Holocaust because of varying experiences and personalities. This is never more evident than when Mala tells Art that she is a survivor, too, and the neighbors are survivors, but none are like Vladek (Spiegelman). Vladek, to Mala, is “infuriating”, because he uses every bit of everything, never wastes anything, and refuses to spend money on anything except the barest necessities.

This is an example of how each survivor has their own story that needs to be told about their life after their experience in the Holocaust. They are not saints; they are just regular people who came out of an incredibly awful and unbelievable situation. Although many have lived on, some were affected more. Some have even learned to forgive the Nazis, as did Eva Moses Kor, the subject of the documentary Forgiving Dr. Mengele. As part of her healing process, she has confronted her past and forgiven Dr. Mengele, a Nazi doctor that performed extreme experiments on twins during the Nazi regime. Kor was a victim of many of these experiments, but as a survivor, she has forgiven Dr. Mengele and the Nazis – not for their benefit, but for hers.

Vladek seems to have never forgiven the Nazi regime, and even blames it for Anja’s suicide. It has affected him adversely in a unique way, and to me that is almost more interesting than the story of his life in Poland. I wish there was a companion piece that told us the story of Vladek’s surviving life in more depth.