MAUS

I am reading the book Maus, by Art Speigelman. It is a survivor's tale about the Holocaust. The main characters are a father, Vladek Spiegelman and his son, the author. It is important to know that this book is a graphic novel, which makes it easier to read such a serious story. In this book the Nazis are drawn as cats and the Jews as mice. This may be a graphic novel but it is scary, heavy and touching. This is a true story as told from the son's point of view. The pictures and words are small and dark, so you have to look closely and can not rush.

The author begins the book with his parent's love story, but that part began after we were told that the author's mother had committed suicide. I don't know what I was expecting, but  I wasn't expecting this book to begin this way. The story quickly turned even darker, Anja, the author's mother tried to avoid getting arrested by hiding some documents in her neighbor's apartment. It turned out the neighbor got arrested. Anja had been translating communist documents. The rest of the book tells the horrors of the Holocaust and how Anja and Vladek survived. The worst part was how the Nazi's killed children by swinging them by their legs and smashing their heads into walls because they were crying.

It is a troubling book to read, even if you don't know anything about the Holocaust. I kept wondering about my family while I was reading. So many of my family did not survive the Holocaust. It is so hard to understand what they went through and honestly, a lot of the time I don't want to understand. I don't know what to do with my feelings about the Holocaust. The author of this book spent time in a state mental hospital, right before his mother committed suicide and I wonder how much the family's surviving the Holocaust had to do with that. What is the past and what is the present? Where is the line that divides them?

The book ends with the author walking away from his father after he found out that his father had burnt his mother's diaries. He called his father a murderer and just walked away. Even after hearing everthing that his father had survived, he still walked away.