Review of the Biografíca Mous novel
Introduction.
Maus tells the biography of Vladek Spiegelman, a Polish surviving Jew of the Nazis extermination fields. Father of the author of this graphic novel. The story begins with Art’s visit to his father’s father, from which he has distanced himself. Vladek lives with his wife’s bad wife, with whom he married after Anja, Art’s mother, committed suicide in 1968.
Art pretends, that Vladek remembers his experience in the Holocaust. This begins by his time in Częstochowa in 1937 and the marriage with his mother Anja. Anja came from a well positioned family and the father of this helped Vladek open a factory in Bielsko. Anja after giving birth to her first child, Richiu, suffers a crisis of postpartum depression and together with Vladek they go to a mental sanatorium in Czechoslovakia. When the couple returns after recovering, political and anti -Semitic tensions grow until Vladek is recruited before the Nazi invasion.
This is captured in the front and forced to work as a war prisoner. When he is finally released, Sosnowiec had been annexed to Germany, so he was taken to the other side of the border in the Polish protectorate. Finally, he manages to hide in the border and meets with his family. In one of his’s home to his home, he finds out that they had received one of the underground magazines where he contributed to prisoner’s cartoon on the planet hell. In which, he represents the suicide of her mother’s mother and Vladek reads her. Although bad, this woman had tried to hide her. This brings painful memories, but he admits his son who was positive to externalize him in this way.
Developing.
In 1943 the family divides, Vladek and Anja send Richieu to Zawiercie with his aunt to be safer, since they were transferring Sosnowiec’s Jews to Srodula. What was a terrible surprise for them is that the aunt decided to poison her children along with Richieu and herself, as the raids increased and sent more Jews to Auschwitz.
Vladek had a srodula bunker, like many of the Jews who lived there to hide from the Germans. But Vladek is discovered and this makes them send it to an area separated by fence. Srodula is completely empty from Jews, but Vladek and Anj. This makes them very little contact with the shortage of Jews in the same situation as them. At one point Vladek is forced to get out of his hiding.
There comes a time when Vladek is talking about Hungary where a cousin of his Abraham is located, he understood that the Jews were much better there. Together with Anja they intend to leave the country in search of a better life, with the help of smugglers. But it turned out to be a trap and the Gestapo stop them along the way, taking them to Auschwitz and there they separate them. In the course of the story we talk about Anja’s newspapers, which contained all the experiences collected from the Holocaust lived by it. Finding them is a way of knowing what happened to Anja after separating marriage in Auschwitz.
Vladek admits to his son that when Anja committed suicide, she burned all her newspapers, letting her know the same time, that she hoped that when Art grew up he would be interested in them. This greatly enraged art. The story goes to chapter II, where we see Art worried. Because he is quite discouraged and insecure of his cartoon embodied in vignettes and does not believe that he can aim so high. To the point of considering ending that. In the course of everyday life we see the relationship between father and son, and the disastrous relationship of Vladek and his bad wife, which does not come to a good end.
But, despite all this, Art continues to record the conversations with his father and collecting all possible information since they are separated into Auschwitz. Later time, we see Art overwhelmed by the unexpected success of his book and at the same time somewhat depressed. Art visits his psychiatrist Pavel once a week, also a holocaust survivor. In one of his sessions, Pavel suggests, that since the victims can never tell their experience, it may be better not to tell more stories.
But Art continues with his father’s recordings and shows us the difficulties that happened in the field, hunger, abuse, the tricks he had to do to get some food or be something else safe, the messages he managed to exchange with AnjaThrough a Hungarian worker, lover of a S.S., etc.
As the war progressed, the German front was forced to go back and all Auschwitz prisoners were transferred within the Reich. From there to Dachau in cars to transport animals, where they were piled up in unimaginable amounts. Those who survived at those endless weeks, finally arrived in Dachau, where misery and human conditions were increasingly going worse. There, Vladek became tifus. Every survivor until then, death in Dachau.
Soon they receive the news that the war was over. Anja was released in Russia and returned to Sosnowiec before Vladek, and he left Poland to Sweden with ten other refugees. They managed to receive news from each other and Vlack returned to Poland in search of Anja. When Vladek finally arrived at Sosnowiec, he found out where the Jewish association was and through them he had Anja again in his life. The story ends with Artie and his recorder in Vladek’s room next to his bed, Vladek is very tired and asks Art to continue another day with the story, calling this Richieu.
conclusion.
Art Spiegelman, in the work he represents the characters through anthropomorphic animals. Specifically, cats are the Germans, the mice of the Jews, the pigs represent the Poles, the frogs to the French and the dogs to the Americans. On some little occasion we can see the British represented as fish and we see some deer for the Swedes. The use of this representation refers to the individual, who is assigned to a simple national, ethnic or racial identity and defines his destiny in the context that is found, in this case in the Holocaust. Spiegelman, said that this characterization decision was an inspiration he had of the American cartoons Cartoons, type ‘’ Tom & Jerry ’’ ’
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