Acting Like An Animal

I am reading a graphic novel called “Maus” by Art Spiegelman.  Usually graphic novels are not that serious and don’t have a good story behind its pictures. However in Maus behind the pictures is a story of Spiegelman’s father’s life growing up and living and surviving through the holocaust.  However the pictures are not of humans but of animals that live like humans. The most common in the book are the mice (Jews), the cats (Nazis/Germans), and pigs (the polish people). I think that the animals we not put in by coincidence. I think that the animals were put in for a purpose to send a message to the reader through the people being animals and how each animal acts a looks like in the story.

            I think the message that Spiegelman was trying to share with the reader by making his images not human was saying that at this time of the holocaust and the war everyone was acting inhuman. By this I mean that everyone is acting like an animal in their own way. One example that I have analyzed from the pictures was the Jews being drawn as mice. By making the Jews mice I interpreted this as telling the reader that all the Jews that were in camps and were being hated and killed by Jews were hated by all and had to scavenge and act inhuman just to get food or things to keep themselves alive. Another example is the Nazis being cats. I think the author made the Nazis cats because he wanted them to be described as powerful and doing anything they want whenever they want just like cats. Also what is the #1 enemy of mice? That’s right, cats are! Mice are terrified of cats and most cats would want all the mice dead just like how the Nazis felt about the Jews. Lastly the author uses pigs to represent the polish people. I think he did this because he wanted the reader to know that the Polish were acting like pigs. They were acting like pigs by not helping the Jews at all and by hording things like heated beds with food in prison camps while the Jews slept in cold tents only being fed crust and soup. This shows that the Polish people were being selfish to the Jews just like pigs.

            I have known a lot about the holocaust by learning about it at Hebrew schools and by reading many books about it, watching many movies, and visiting many museums. But I have never experienced or fully understood or felt for much of the holocaust until I met and learned the story of a holocaust survivor. This was one of the greatest but also scariest and depressing experiences I have ever had. This old woman had nothing left in her life, no family, no friends, and no nothing. Yet she chose to live through into her old years because she never wants the Nazis to succeed and get what they wanted, her death. She was put in a ghetto, or a small house where all her belongs were taking away and she wash squished in with the rest of her family, which was highly guarded by Nazis and would stay their until the Nazis had orders to else with them (probably death). Once they finally found out that they were going to be put to death her father gave her a ball of chocolate and snuck her and only her into the sewer system where she and only she without her family would attempt to escape. The family would make a distracting to save her and get her out sacrificing their own lives. She was in the sewer for days and days and only survived by licking the chocolate ball once a day. In the sewer it was hot/muggy and smelly. The family was killed for having escaped her and after her being sent to so many different camps and almost dying she survived and made it through to the end. She does not hide her stories but shares then to the world in order to tell them how she survived and how her parents were killed for doing nothing but save their own daughter from death. Incent people died, her parents dies, her friends died, yet she lives to tell her story because she loves to live and because she strives to help herself and the rest of the world survive.