Everyone has heard the saying, “Oh, the humanity!”, but what does it mean. What is humanity? Merriam-Webster defines humanity as “quality or state of being humane” or the “quality or state of being human”(“Humanity”). Humanity is being kind and compassionate and helping out your fellow man. Maus is a great tool to use to study humanity. Maus shows the depth and degress of humanity and inhumanity of humans. The novel also shows how people's humanity can change for better or for worse.
There are numerous accounts of inhumanity in Maus. The most obvious and heinous is the mass extermination of the European Jewish population by the Nazis. But the Nazis were just cruel in general. The Nazis were cruel to the Jews before the war started. Art shows Nazis making a Jewish man holding a sign saying “I'm a filthy Jew” and Vladek tells of how the Nazi police took another Jewish man and no one ever saw him again (39). The panel shows one Nazi police officer restraining a Jewish man, while another Nazi beats the Jewish man with a club. Both of those instances occurred before the war offically started, but during the beginning of the occupation of Czechoslovakia. When Vladek is the POW camp in 1939, a Nazi officer refused to feed Vladek and the others because a huge stable was not spotlessly clean in one hour. Vladek said that during a round up in the Srodula ghetto that “Some kids were screaming...they couldn't stop. So the Germans swinged them by the legs against a wall and they never anymore screamed” (110). Some Nazis would just shoot random Jews in the ghettos, without any reason to do so. In the work camps, the Nazis were no better. The “food” they fed the prisoners was never enough and often mixed sawdust or glass (209). Once Vladek wa...
... middle of paper ...
...childern in a neighboring ghetto. A friend showed Vladek the bunker under the shows and said he and the family could hide in there. There was a Jewish stranger in Sosnowiec who helped Vladek find food and shelter. Even in Auschwitz the Jews helped eachother out. Vladek managed to get Mandelbaum some necessities like a spoon, belt, and proper fitting shoes. Anja was helped in the camps as well. Mancie and a few other women would help and protect Anja. And Vladek helped Anja when he could. He would send bread and letters for Anja with Mancie. The Jews helped each other to survive.
Vladek was not perfect. He did what he needed to do to survive. Vladek dealt in illegal black market trading, frequently bribed people and sometimes stood idly by while bad things happened to others. But he never lost his humanity. Vladek was never cruel and he helped others when he could.
The information above proves that the Nazis were cruel in more than one way. They split families upon arrival, they killed children, and numerous innocent people. All these actions are cruel, therefore, it proves that the Nazis were cruel. The Nazis killed people without hesitation everyday, and then never thought about it
The Germans can only be described as monsters, for their horrific acts of cruelty are wholly inhumane. During the Holocaust, the Germans strip the Jews of everything in their possession, to the point where the Jews are completely dehumanized. This is all a part of the Germans’ scheme to massacre the Jews with...
Nazi soldiers took Jews to concentration camps by cargo trains like they were cattle, they branded them with numbers and their Jewish name disappeared also Jews were beaten ferociously and sometimes to death. The Nazi soldiers treated the Jews and many others without any type of respect; they absolutely saw the people as animals and treated them as if they were. ...
Vladek has a very complex personality that evolved so muh because of the expereinces that he made
In Maus the Germans dislike the Jews and with this discrimination and mistreatment, it caused Vladek and his family many hardships by trying to survive, “It was many, many such stories-synagogues burned, Jews beaten with no reason, whole towns pushing out all Jews-Each story worse than the other” (Speigalman) this quote explains how the Germans just didn’t like the Jew and that’s why they were being beaten and their businesses were being taken away. There are people in this world that don’t like a certain race, and think that their race is better than others; like the Nazis in Maus who were German, didn’t like the Jew so they killed and mistreated them. In the story by Spiegalman Jews were sent to concentration camps that the Nazis built to slowly torture and kill them. Controlled by Adolf Hitler, the Nazis took away the businesses of Jews and their own personal belongings; Spiegalman writes, “Has the family been taking good care of my Bielsko textile factory? Don’t you know?..All the Jewish businesses have been taken over by the Aryan Managers” (Speigalman 76) this quote explains how the Germans were taking over the Jewish people’s businesses and there was nothing that they can do about
In the years after the Holocaust the survivors from the concentration camps tried to cope with the horrors of the camps and what they went through and their children tried to understand not only what happened to their parents. In the story of Maus, these horrors are written down by the son of a Holocaust survivor, Vladek. Maus is not only a story of the horrors of the concentration camps, but of a son, Artie, working through his issues with his father, Vladek. These issues are shown from beginning to end and in many instances show the complexity of the father-son relationship that was affected from the Holocaust. Maus not only shows these matters of contentions, but that the Holocaust survivors constantly put their children’s experiences to unreasonable standards of the parent’s Holocaust experiences.
Possessing intelligence was vital for Vladek, since every move he took would mean life or death. Vladek knew if he wanted to survive in the concentration camps, he must make clever actions and have inside information on what the Nazis were planning. Since Vladek knew English, he started teaching it to a Nazi who worked at his concentration camp and befriended him. His Nazi friend informed Vladek on what was going to happen to the Jews, and how he could survive. Vladek’s intelligence is the main reason he survived throughout the Holocaust, and his intelligence also saved the life of his wife.
Vladek lived a normal life before the war, got married to Anja a daughter of a millionaire. He also got Richieu his first son. They all lived a happy life for awhile until the Swastika was raised as an emblem of the German Nazi party. That’s when the fairytale ended. Vladek went to the army and got captured by the Nazi. Back to luckiness, he could easily died at the P.O.W camp, disease, hunger or even get beat up by the Nazi. On page 48, the bullets came in his direction, the bullet ricochet on his helmet, he could have died if the soldier aim better or if he didn’t have the helmet, he could have easily been dead. Being resourceful also helped him in the war. On page 53, he bathed in the river in the winter, unlike his soldier mates, he didn’t get infection on his frostbites.
He got rid of greedy people, rapists, thieves, and beggars. He did it by any means necessary but it still worked. He was only cruel to the people who threatened his people and he was a respected ruler. Vlad became a well-respected ruler overall. On the night of June 16th Vlad, and a handful of men organized a night attack on the Ottoman army. They went into the camp disguised as Turks and tried to capture or assassinate the Sultan. Even though they did not succeed the Turks started killing each other because of the
On their way to the concentration camp, a German officer said, “’There are eighty of you in the car… If anyone is missing, you’ll all be shot like “dogs” ”’ (Wiesel 24). This shows that the Germans compared the Jews to dogs or animals, and that the German have no respect towards the Jews. Arrived at the concentration camp, the Jews were separated from their friends and family. The first thing of the wagon, a SS officer said, “’Men to the left! Women to the right!”’ (Wiesel 29). After the separation, Eliezer saw the crematories. There he saw “’a truck [that] drew close and unloaded its hold: small children, babies … thrown into the flames.” (Wiesel 32). This dehumanize the Jews, because they were able to smell and see other Jews burn in the flames. Later on the Jew were forced to leave their cloth behind and have been promise that they will received other cloth after a shower. However, they were force to work for the new cloth; they were forced to run naked, at midnight, in the cold. Being force to work for the cloth, by running in the cold of midnight is dehumanizing. At the camp, the Jews were not treated like human. They were force to do thing that was unhuman and that dehumanized
The inhumanity in the Holocaust was unbelievable. So many horrible things happened in this bitter time
They all had to live in the Warsaw ghetto (“Children’s Diaries”). Halina, another child survivor, tells us what happened to her while in hiding. Halina and her family went into hiding with a friend of her mother in a basement (“Peabody”).... ... middle of paper ...
...s would be all too happy to pay for a meal with the lives of others, there were some good people left. There were people all around who were ready to aid someone else in their quest to stay alive, sometimes at the expense of their own lives. People such as the soldier, the priest, Ms. Motonowa, and Mancie kept things going from day to day for the Spiegelmans. In the end, Vladek and the others survived not because they did not have any friends as Vladek feels, but because they had many friends. Without the people who helped them along the way, Anja and Vladek would have surely died in the concentration camps along with the hundreds of others victims who were not so lucky.
Vladek has clearly never fully recovered from the horrors of the Holocaust. Because he was once wealthy and carefree now he’s cheap and pragmatic. Once a generous businessman now he’s a selfish miser. The Holocaust affect each survivor differently. Art notes on a few separate occasions, the Holocaust cannot be the reason for all of Vladek’s behavior. “I used to think the war made him this way.” Art says to Mala. In which, she responds that "all our friends went through the camps; nobody is like him!” It may be that no survivor is like him, but it’s the way he copes with what he went through. Basically, he’s still living his life as if he were still in those concentration camps in the present time.
Many racial and ethnic groups are treated cruel, which contributes to the problem of discrimination. The inhumane treatment inflicted onto different racial and ethnic groups is provoking horrific violence around the world. The film The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, gives us an insight to the cruel treatment endured by Jewish people in World War II. Jewish people were taken from their homes, separated from their families, and placed in concentration camps where they were expected to die. They were exposed to extreme levels of abuse, such as starvation, physical beatings, and emotional torture. The fear and terrorizing the soldiers used on the Jews is shown in the scene when Lieutenant Kotler catches Shmuel eating a cookie: “Are you eating? Have you been stealing food?