With historical events as large and dehumanizing as the Holocaust was for so many people, representation and retelling of the event becomes a difficult subject. How can someone accurately convey the pain and suffering so many millions of people felt especially when there is the potential for someone to profit? Art Spiegelman's comic book Maus was subjected to the same criticism and more surrounding the ethics from publishing his comic and the issues raised by the tale of his father's survival. The means that Vladek Spiegelman and other Jews used to try and remain alive were considered barbaric by the outside world and brings into question the ethics of survival and the fragility of morality. Art Spiegelman portrays this complex issue on page one hundred and fourteen with the interaction between Vladek and his cousins Haskel and Jakov. Although this event happened early on in the Holocaust, the fear within the Jewish community was still evident. Vladek and his wife Anja and her family had been rounded up by the Germans in Sosnowiec and put into a building …show more content…
Before events such as deportation to Auschwitz, German and Polish morals had already begun to weaken. The Nazi's used propaganda to ensure that the image of the Jewish community was a negative one. By making people like Vladek wear the Star of David, the party was able to completely dehumanize the Jews. Their association with evil allowed for the swaying and comprised Polish and German morals. This complete dismissal of ethical behavior demonstrates the truth of the current fragility of morals in these communities. The evident decaying of morals may add to why Vladek is so comfortable with Jakov's behavior. Since Vladek has already been discriminated against for many years, it is possible that he sees Jakov's actions as normal and in line with how others have treated
Many actions played out during the Holocaust and World War II were not humane, and still remind us like a scream behind closed doors: hidden but still heard. While hearing the horrid stories and seeing the ghoulish photos of times not to be forgotten, we see the tragedy that is the mistreatment of human lives. Our identities are lost little by little, but those victims had theirs ripped from their bodies. After losing everything and then becoming a nearly empty vessel, it is amazing that we attempt to comprehend the cruelty of the Holocaust. The loss of identity and self might have started with Adolf Hitler’s reign, for the Holocaust legacies, but we are all losing bits of ourselves constantly.
Solomon Radasky was born in Warsaw, Poland, on May 17, 1910. He worked in the Praga district of Warsaw with the family business of making fur coats. He had 2 brothers, 3 sisters, and a mother and father who lived in the same area as Solomon. He remembers that whenever a Jewish holiday came in his town, the stores closed for the day and everyone celebrated the Jewish holiday. In his early 30’s, the Nazis began to force many Jewish families, along with the Radasky family, into the newly established ghettos.
“Under A Cruel Star” despite being an excellent book to read was not credible or believable as compared to Kevin McDermott’s scholarly article. Heda Kovaly depicts popular opinion under Communist dictatorship as being controlled by terror of the government. She states that popular opinion no longer comprised morals or humanity, but instead was uttered by fear and doubts of the consequences of their actions and the domination of the government. This significance of life can be explored and tested against details found in secondary sources. “Under A Cruel Star”, a primary source, provides personal experiences through the political difficulties of Jews while secondary source in Kevin McDermott’s article provides accurate facts of events that
The topic of the essay is Art Spiegelman’s Maus and my main aim is to try to convey and discuss the thematic aspects of the work in combination with its influence upon the studies regarding the Shoah. The essay opens with an extremely brief and general introduction about the birth of the graphic novel in the U.S., and follows with a summary of Art Spiegelman’s biography. After giving a description of Spiegelman’s masterpiece, I will focus on the so called issue of post-memory and on its repercussion on the peculiar relationship between father and son represented in this comic book.
Many lives were lost during the German’s attempt to wipe out all Jews, and those who lived lost a part of their life during this time. The young boys lost their childhood and ‘innocences’. They witness more death and suffering than anywhere in the country. Today, there is still death and violence against others.
In Maus, Art Spiegelman records his personal accounts of trying to delve into his father’s traumatic past. His father, Vladek, is a Jew from Poland who survived persecution during World War II. Art wants to create a graphic novel about what his father went through during the Holocaust, so he reconnects with Vladek in order to do so. Due to the horrifying things that the Jews went through he has trouble opening up completely about all the things that happened to him. But after Art gets together with his father many times, he is finally able to understand the past legacy of the Spiegelman family.
Art Spiegelman offers a very unique point of view in his two narratives, Maus I and Maus II. In these two books, Spiegelman takes us through the life of his father Vladek and his journey during World War II in Europe. Spiegleman also confronts how post-memory has effected him through the years, even when he was growing up. These two books reflect perfectly on a survivors story using symbolism and analogy.
Art Spiegelman's graphic novel Maus is a story that clearly displays the appalling treatment of the Jew's during this time. To effectively show this, Speigelman uses a variety of powerful literary devices. These include the use of black, white and shading, the way people are depicted and font & text size. A good example of this is the inserted comic, Prisoner On the Hell Planet (pg.
In the graphic novel Maus II, Art Spiegelman reveals what hardships his father had to go through to survive his time during the Holocaust. Elie Wiesel depicted what him and his father went through to withstand the suffering in the concentration camps during the holocaust in his autobiography, Night. The connection between these two works from contrasting genres is the relationships and loyalty to family and friendships shown throughout these accounts. When facing critical situations, remaining loyal to your family and friends is more essential to survival than self-preservation and resourcefulness. Having close relationships with friends and family could benefit you by granting you opportunities to receive support, resources and other components to survival.
Another factor is that Vladkek’s meaningful relationships were affected by the Holocaust is that Vladkek knows that there is no such thing as friends. He doesn’t have a strong and meaningful relationship with Artie because he never had a stable relationship with him. Int the flashback on the beginning of the book Vladkek say “Friends? There’s no such thing as Friends”,This means that Vladkek will never have meaningful relationships because he doesn’t believe in friends which is the most important factor of creating meaningful
This book shows how the Holocaust should be taught and not be forgotten, due to it being a prime example of human impureness. Humans learn off trial and error, how the Jewish population was affected, decrease in moral, and the unsettled tension are prime examples of such mistakes. The Jewish population was in jeopardy, therefore other races in the world are at risk of genocide as well and must take this event as a warning of what could happen. In the Auschwitz concentration camp, there was a room filled with shoes.
Vladek was a real person who survived the Holocaust, a terrible war in that many people died. Vladek survived by pretending to be a Pole soldier who escaped the camps(pg.64). He then told the conductor if he could hide him and take him home. He got lucky the conductor helped him, but he still used his knowledge to pretend to be a Pole. Vladek also survived by making bunkers for him and his family to hide in (pg.110).
Retaining one’s virtue whilst living in Nazi Germany is challenging,
Throughout Maus, Vladek is telling his son Artie about how he survived the Holocaust. He explained to Artie that before the war, life was good for him and his family. He tells him everything about his experience during the war as well, from the relationship he had with his family and Anja, to his friendships with both gentiles and Jews, to things he might of found or kept throughout the war. However now, a few decades after the war, Vladek’s lifestyle has changed drastically from during the war, and even from before the war. Vladek’s friendships, relationships, and everyday life has changed due to the Holocaust and WWII.
Maus is a story about the survivor that is Vladek Spiegelman. His son Art Spiegelman includes the interview process and the story of how the Holocaust formed the person that his father became. He went from a passionate, free-spirited young man to an angry, short-tempered man. The war had effects on Vladek that couldn 't be as easily understood unless the book was written and went so into detail about each aspect of his life. The complexity of Vladek Spiegelman is one of the main topics that is spread throughout both of