Maus II

Wow is Maus II a different animal from Maus I.  Maus I leaves off with Anja and Vladek arriving at Auschwitz.  While their journey has been tough, it is nothing compared to what they go through in the concentration camp.  For one thing, they are, for the first time ever, separated.  For another, death is EVERYWHERE around them.  We don't get to know exactly what happened to Anja, only that she survived thanks to Mancie keeping her close.  But we get Vladek's trials in great detail.  How he taught someone English which kept him out of hard labour for a few months.  How he managed to convince people he was a tinsmith or a shoe maker, which helped keep him alive.  How he managed to get food in exchange for other things (and used that food to bribe his superiors so they would do their best to keep him around).  How he got lucky and hid in the bathroom during an inspection when he was sick and would have been killed for sure.  How he was marched out of Auschwitz, left in a train car to die only to survive.  Escaping that train (near the end of the war), he was picked up by more Germans and thought for sure he was going to die before morning; only to wake up and the Germans had run off.  This happened twice.  And how he worked for the Americans near the end of the war before making his way back to Poland and Anja, who was waiting for him there. 

On the other side of this story is Vladek's story with Mala.  Mala leaves him, so he calls his son and daughter in law to come and stay with him.  How his health is deteriorating but he refuses to pay for a live-in nurse or enter a retirement home.  His son can't stand being around him for too long and doesn't want Vladek to move in with him and his wife; he keeps hoping that Vladek and Mala will get back together (which they do in the end).  Oh, and how Spiegelman's wife picks up a hitchhiker and Vladek is incredibly angry and racist because the hitchhiker is a black person - both Spiegelman and his wife point out how Vladek of all people shouldn't be racist after his experience (but he says, not in these words, that his experience with black people is why he IS racist towards them).

So yes, Maus II is a very different book than Maus I.  Maus II is a much darker story, which I found much harder to read at times (I had to take a break from reading after Chapter 3 because it was just so heavy).  While they are different books, they are both good in their own way.  I'm glad I finally made the time to read both Maus I and II.  I haven't read much Holocaust literature, but wow did these two books make the experience so human and personal.  They are definitely both worth reading.

Maus I

I've been meaning to read Maus for quite awhile.  Back in school, people recommended it to me, saying how good it is.  Later both my brother and dad read it and loved it.  My brother lent it to me and it's been sitting on my shelf since then.  But today, since I wasn't feeling great, I decided that reading Maus was a good use of my time. 

Maus is a Holocaust story.  The comic artist Art Spiegelman wants to get his father's Holocaust story down.  So he goes over to his father's house on a series of visits to hear the tale, later turning it into this comic.  He's made the people into animals, with the Jewish people of the tale mice (and the Gestapo are cats, which I thought was a nice touch). 

Spiegelman's father, Vladek, has remarried, so we see scenes from his new life interspersed around his Holocaust tale as a framing narrative.  Vladek is still very much in love with Anja, Spiegelman's mother who survived the war but later commit suicide. 

The story starts off before the war, showing what Vladek's life was like before the Nazis invaded Poland.  Vladek was a very eligible bachelor prior to meeting and falling in love with Anja.  Anja was from a wealthy family who lived in a nearby town.  The family prospered until the Nazis arrived; although they managed to stay together for quite a long time, they lost their fancy lifestyle and were slowly pulled apart. 

This Holocaust story is broken up by scenes from Vladek's present life.  He has remarried a woman named Mala who also survived the war.  The two do not get along.  Spiegelman ends up in the middle of their domestic fights: Vladek says they are always arguing (generally about money) and Mala says she feels like she is stuck in a prison with a very miserly man.  This argument is at odds with Vladek's earlier tale where he has been paying people off left and right in an attempt to keep his family alive and together.   

Maus I ends with Anja and Vladek, the last two of the family, trying to make it to nearby Hungary.  But they were sold out by the smugglers who were helping them and have been taken to Auschwitz.  But it's nearing the end of the war, so I'm very much interested to see where things go from here.

Oh, an important note: Vladek has just admitted to his son that he burned Anja's diaries after she died.  He found the memories too painful to deal with in the aftermath of her suicide.

School Book: In the Shadow of No Towers

I was pretty busy today so I decided to read Art Spiegelman's In the Shadow of No Towers. It's a board book/graphic novel, so I knew I could finish it in one night.

In the Shadow of No Towers was a pretty cool read. The first half of the book is made up of the actual comic strip. It deals with the author/illustrator's feelings in the wake of September 11th. The first few panels seemed a bit confusing, but once I got past that I enjoyed reading them.

The second half of the book was really cool though. It has several comic strips from New York at the beginning of the 20th Century reproduced. It was really interesting to learn about them. But more than that, Spiegelman based some of his panels from his strip from these; so while I was reading them, I was repeatedly struck with "aha" moments, realizing where he got the inspiration for some things from.

In the Shadow of No Towers is a quick read that I really enjoyed. Being so far removed from the actual events, it was informative to see how someone who witnessed the towers tumbling felt both during and after 9/11. I can't wait to talk about it in class this term!