Metaphors (MAUS)

I'm currently reading MAUS, by Art Spiegelman. This book is about the son of a survivor of the Holocaust recounting his father telling his story. It is written as a graphic novel, with very expressive pictures. In the book, the author has asked his father to tell his holocaust story from beginning to end, and that is how the book goes. The pictures are very unique. They are in black in white, with dots and lines being Spiegelman's tools for shading and texture. What the story lacks in detail, the pictures make up with the detailed drawings filling in the gaps. But what is truly most unique about these drawings is the animals.

Instead of humans in MAUS, people are represented as a type of animal. The Jewish are mice. The Germans are cats. The Polish are pigs. The meaning to the symbolism in these drawings is easy enough to find. The Germans being represented as cats is because they are predators, Jews being their prey as mice. For the Polish, I am no sure why they are pigs. I don't know enough of the back story of the Holocaust. I did find this symbolism very nice and clear. It was probably intended to avoid confusion between ethnicities of characters for readers, while it also ultimately contained some of he author's own opinions on the Holocaust. I appreciated this because it was  almost the sole part of the book with the author's thoughts. The rest is just retell.

During the Holocaust, my family were some of the few Jewish people lucky enough to escape to Hungary. I do not know much about the Holocaust, which is what makes his book interesting for me. I am able to experience some of the events that took place during this time period. I can try to imagine how my grandparents felt about what was happening with the world around them. And I can do this while experiencing Vladek's story.