Review: Maus II by Art Spiegelman

Maus II:  A Survivor’s Tale: And Here My Troubles Began is the second part in a comic book memoir by Art Spiegelman that details his father Vladek’s Holocaust survival story.  Maus II picks up right where Maus I:  A Survivor’s Tale:  My Father Bleeds History leaves off, with Vladek and Art’s mother, Anja, being taken to Auschwitz after their attempts to flee Poland in 1944 backfire.

This book goes a little farther in showing how the Holocaust continues to affect Vladek decades later.  His second wife, Mala, has left him, and he begs Art and his wife to spend the summer with him in his cottage in the Catskills.  The two just want to make sure Vladek is okay on his own, but Vladek’s frailties and hoarding are on full display; when a dish breaks, he says he will glue it back together, and he even tries to return half-eaten groceries to the store so they will not go to waste.

Vladek’s hoarding and refusal to spend money anger Art, who still struggles with his parents’ Holocaust experiences and his mother’s suicide.  He even feels some sibling rivalry with Richieu, the brother he never knew except in faded photographs.  After Vladek’s death, Art has trouble writing about his father’s Auschwitz experiences and dealing with the success of Maus I.  He sees a psychiatrist, a Czech Jew who survived two camps and helps Art overcome his writing block.

Much of Maus II is about how Vladek survived Auschwitz.  The creativity he exhibited in finding work and trading for food while he and Anja were in the ghetto and later in hiding also helped him stay alive in the concentration camp.  Vladek’s story is both heart-breaking and downright amazing, and the fact that he was able to communicate with his wife in the camp and even help keep her alive shows the depth of their love and makes it easy to see why he fell apart after her suicide.  The evacuation of Auschwitz, the death march to the Gross-Rosen concentration camp, the overcrowded cattle cars to Dachau, and the spread of typhus are described in few but powerful words.

Just like Maus I, the illustrations in Maus II are horrifying and necessary.  They tell a story of their own, rich with symbolism given that the characters are once again drawn as animals.  The Jews are depicted as mice, the Nazis and other Germans as cats, the Poles as pigs, and a lone Frenchman as a frog.  Once again, I was so involved in the story that I forgot after awhile that the illustrations were of animals even while I appreciated the symbolism.

Honestly, I didn’t expect Maus to affect me as much as it did.  I didn’t think a comic book tale with illustrations of animals could be so powerful, but I’m glad I was wrong.  These books brought me to tears, and some scenes hit me hard like a kick to the stomach.  I am always amazed at how people are able to survive the harshest and worst of circumstances, and Maus is one of the most gripping survivor stories I’ve ever read.  Spiegelman does an excellent job immortalizing his parents and showing the burdens that the survivors carried throughout their lives, even passing them on to their children.  It’s hard to put into words just how these books affected me, so I urge you to read them.  I hope you find, like I have, that they provide much food for thought and will sear their haunting images into your mind for a long time.

Disclosure: I borrowed Maus I: A Survivor’s Tale: And Here My Troubles Began from my local library. I am an IndieBound affiliate and an Amazon associate.

© 2012 Anna Horner of Diary of an Eccentric. All Rights Reserved. Please do not reproduce or republish content without permission.