Maus I: My Father Bleeds History By Art Spiegelman

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Mikayla Kissel 004548933 HIST 144: World Civilization III Jewish Persecution During the Nazi reign, Jewish people along with other groups were persecuted and used as scapegoats to the German people. The Nazi’s and German people gathered up Jewish people and massacred about 6 million people in the idea that they were the vermin of Germany that was holding them down. Jew’s were robbed of everything they had and sent off to concentration camps where they were beaten, starved, and murdered. The novel Maus I: My Father Bleeds History by Art Spiegelman illustrates this by giving us a detailed encounter of the holocaust through the authors’ father’s experience. Spiegelman illustrates the Jews as mice because it symbolizes how the Jews were run off and were killed and hunted like vermin. The Germans were illustrated as cats because they were the “hunter”. The graphic novel Maus I: My Father Bleeds History gives you a personal view of the Holocaust and the horrific Nazi reign through guilt, survival and, luck. Maus expresses guilt on both an individual and collective form. Many survivors form a sense of guilt because they start to feel guilt for surviving when millions were murdered in camps that they survived. Art’s father Vladek suffers from survival guilt and somehow always finds a way to connect everything with the Holocaust along with his parenting with Art. After Vladek tells his son of how he met and fell in love with his mother, he is quick to say how he wouldn’t want him to write such thing in his novel about the Holocaust. He feels it would be improper and disrespectful to the event. This shows how he feels he is responsible for the Holocaust being given respect because he guilts his survival and feels a responsibility to t... ... middle of paper ... ...many languages he can speak. In his guilt and survival, surviving is seen as having luck. Even though his abilities increased his likely hood of survival, his along with all other survivors of the Holocaust were solely based off of luck. Vladek tells Art several of his near miss death experiences where luck was truly on his side. During Vladek’s experience as a prisoner of war he has a near miss death experience when he is shooting and is almost beaten by the solider but because he began to reply in German another solider intervened. Mere luck saved not only Vladek’s life but few others. Another survivor named Ziggy Shipper described himself as lucky to have survived. He felt he owed it to those who did not survive to keep talking about what had happened. Even though luck saved them from death, luck couldn’t save them from the horrors and affects of the Holocaust.

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