Reading Maus

With little to do after finals, I decided to pick through my shelves and read a few books I bought but were never able to read throughout the semester. I always heard Maus–a graphic novel about the story of a Polish man who survived the Holocaust going through the concentration camps–was a really good comic, one of the few to win a Pulitzer prize. I picked it up at 10 PM, and five hours later, as I set down the book at 3 AM, I felt exhausted and contemplative.

For one thing, I found Art Spiegelman’s decision to portray people as animals to be very intriguing. The Jews were literally “mice” (as portrayed in Nazi Propoganda), the Germans were cats but seemed more to resemble tigers, the Poles who weren’t Jews were pigs, the French were frogs (a very romantic choice), and the Americans were loyal looking puppy dogs. When one character masqerades as another (such as Jew trying to pass as a Pole), they would don a mask of the character’s face (mice wearing a pig’s mask).

What makes this entire amalgam of animals even more interesting is the fact that the story is not told like a straight narrative, but from the perspective of the artist talking with his father. The scenes are so genuine, and the author does not hide his own prejudices, emotions, or reactions towards his father throughout the process. The author was rude to his father, he was nonchalant, he was at times argumentative and impatient. Given the context of the father’s story, we tend to expect the son to have more admiration and gratitude for what the father has gone through, and if not love and admiration, at least some respect. But there is no romanticism in Maus. The author is as straight as candid in reporting his own self as he is reporting the story of his father–both are as real as real can be, and both characters are portrayed as mice in the story. In that regard, the story may seem fictional (all the characters are animals), but the vibe and feel turn out to be more genuine than most novels or books try to achieve.

After reading Maus, I remember thinking to myself as I was walking home: I don’t think I can ever comprehend the terror that is the Holocaust. I hear of it, I learn of it in textbooks, I read it in novels, I see it in pictures–but I don’t think I can ever fully comprehend it. After finishing Maus, I saw my feet shuffling across the pavement at 3 AM in the morning on the street, how real my feet looked, how real the pavement looked. It was cold as heck, I couldn’t feel my face, and the yellow streetlights everywhere just blinked inanely at the street corners, giving the dark an uncanny hue. A cop car turns a corner. I think to myself: this isn’t Nazi Germany, and I am not a jew, so why was I so freaked out when a skateboarder passed me by in the night? Sure, it’s unusual for anyone to want to skate at this ungodly hour, but what if a true sense of danger and death loomed persistently in the air? Real violence? Real blood? Real bodies? Again, I see how real my feet looks as it moves across the street, and I just try to imagine if there were bodies all over, how I would feel if the bodies did not reside in the comforts of my imagination as  “mice people”, but as true people.

I felt a shiver run up my spine, and I know I will never, ever come close to comprehending the terror that is the Holocaust.