Night And Maus Motivation

The Holocaust was a wretched period in World History. It was a miserable time for both the Germans and especially the undesirables. The Germans, under Hitler’s power, were going throughout different parts of Europe and taking Jewish people. The Nazis brought them to Ghettos to starve, get beaten, and be mistreated, until it was time to take them to a concentration camp. There, they were put to work and at the same time were given little to no food. Getting out alive seemed hopeless, but those who lived, published, talked about, and wrote about their time in the Holocaust. In Night and Maus, Elie Wiesel and Art Speigelman lead us through their past and told us their story.

The primary motivation of the Jewish people in the Holocaust was survival. In the book Night, there is more of a ruthless behavior in their management to survive. This is apparent especially in the intense struggle to acquire food. For example, there is clear instances of people trying to survive, "Meir, Meir, my boy! Don't you recognize me? I'm your father you're hurting me, you're killing your father! I've got some bread for you too, for you too"(96). That quote greatly impacts the reader and shows how messed up people were becoming in order to survive day by day. In that passage it describes how a boy beat his father to death over a piece of bread thrown into the train on the way to a concentration camp. Survival seemes to be more important than family in the book Night, but it was not that extreme and brutal in the book Maus. In that book, survival was simply a battle to stay out of the concentration camps. An example of this in Maus is when it says "So in the yard, we made a hiding place, a bunker." (Spieglmen 86) Here, it explains that their worries are ...

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...ive. Sometimes being courageous and compassionate was not always the best for them though. For example, in Maus, Vladek was beaten harshly, “When I’m finished with you, you’ll know something, Jewish pimp…Count the blows. If you lose count, I’ll start again!” (57). The beating was the result of Vladek trying to speak to his wife Anja and getting caught by a guard. A similar experience occurred in Night when Elie saw Idek fooling around with a Polish prisoner. Idek saw him looking and decided to beat him brutally. “I no longer felt anything except the lashes of the whip. ‘One!…Two!… he was counting. He took his time between lashes. Only the first really hurt” (57). Both characters were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Life and death for them was on a thin line and surviving looked bleak.

Survivor is a title Elie Wiesel and Vladek Spiegelman will hold forever.