Maus - Art Spiegelman

“The Complete Maus” contains the two books:
Maus – A Survivor’s Tale – My Father Bleeds History – first published in 1986
Maus – A Survivor’s Tale – And Here My Troubles Began – first published in 1991
The complete book has 296 pages.
Art tells the story of his father, Vladek, during the World War II as a Polish Jew and his love to his first wife and the author’s mother Anja, and in the present, in Rego Park, NY, and his relationship with his second wife Mala and his son, Art, the author. It is a comic book. The Jews are painted as mice. The Polish as pigs. The Germans as cats and the Americans as dogs.
It is the first time I read a comic book as an adult. Telling a holocaust story as a comic book seemed like a very strange and unfitting idea to me, but I read a great review of the book, and read the first chapter online and liked it a lot, so I decided to try the book.
I thought the book was excellent. I can totally understand why it won the Pulitzer Prize. By moving from the present to the past, showing at the same time the story of the son who tries to learn the history of his parents and deals with a very difficult father, and the story of the Jews in Poland when their world collapsed and they struggled to survive in a cruel and senseless reality that seems too horrid to be real. The author also talks about the writing process itself, how he struggles to keep his father’s stories in order, to sway him from complaining about the present back to his past.
As the subtitle says, we have the story of a survivor, one of very few, while so many others didn’t come out alive from the holocaust hell. It is amazing again and again to learn how Vladek survived, how he had to use all his intellect, talents and resourcefulness to escape death and destruction. In the present story, we can see how all the qualities he had to adopt in order to survive make it so difficult for him and for others around him. Like someone says in the book, part of him didn’t really survive. He is extremely tight with money. He cannot see food wasted. He insists on doing everything on his own, or with the help he demands from his son, instead of paying for someone to do the job. It is so tragic to see how he cannot let go of these qualities that helped him stay alive even though it makes it impossible for people who love him to be at his side for long periods of time. The author also shows how, like many others who suffered from racial hate and discrimination in the worse possible way, he is blind to these qualities in himself, when burst in anger because Art’s wife takes a black hitchhiker – doesn’t she know better? He could have stolen all their groceries! When she confronts him and asks him how he can say that after all he’s gone through, he is shocked at the comparison of blacks and Jews.
The book also shows the desperate quest of the author to find out about his mother, who killed herself when he was 20 years old. He can only hear about her story indirectly from his father. It is much less clear how she survived the hell. Unlike Vladek, she was frail, thin, week. Art, and the reader, will never know for sure.
The story is very hard to read. No matter how much I read, hear and watch about these terrible years, every story is shocking all over again. What people had to go through, not by some natural caused disaster, but by the cold systematic cruelty of other people, is impossible to grasp. It doesn’t make it easier that this book is a comic book. On the contrary, since it makes the events so alive and real, it makes it worse. It is a hard read, but it is worth it, this is one of the best Holocaust books I’ve read.