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Maus: A Survivor’s Tale is a book about surviving the Holocaust and the decades-long trauma that followed for survivors and their families. It tells the true story of Vladek Spiegelman and how he survived World War II and the Holocaust. Framing Vladek’s story is another true story, one of Artie Spiegelman’s project to record his father’s story and turn it into a comic book. Maus contains many contradictions in its structure and narrative. It is a serious recounting of the Holocaust told in the form of comics, a medium known for its appeal to children. It is nonfiction, and yet every character in the book is drawn as an anthropomorphized animal. It sets out to tell a story about Vladek’s history but can never quite leave the story of Artie and his present-day anxieties. The result is a graphic novel that defined the possibilities of the form, demonstrating how comics can wrestle with the complex interaction of truth and art.
The majority of the plot of Maus is driven by Vladek’s recounting of his life in the lead-up to and duration of World War II. During World War II, the Nazi party of Germany, led by Adolf Hitler, carried out an extended campaign of persecution against the Jewish people. This campaign began with laws restricting the rights of Jewish people, escalated to moving all Jewish people into ghettos, and ultimately culminated in their imprisonment and murder in concentration camps with forced labor, rampant disease, and starvation. Vladek, who is Jewish, recounts a series of conflicts that demonstrate how he was able to survive such persecution and protect his wife Anja and their family. Vladek’s story shows him to be a skilled businessman who knows how to use the resources available to him. He demonstrates confidence and boldness, pretending to be Polish and volunteering himself as an expert on tin-smithing and shoemaking when he is only slightly familiar with these trades. He saves his cigarettes, bread rations, and chocolate bars in order to trade for more valuable goods or for preferential treatment for himself or for Anja.
Maus depicts Vladek as exceptionally skillful and intelligent. But this characterization, at least in part, matches the antisemitic stereotype of the Jew as a greedy schemer. European Christians believed Jewish people were greedy capitalists who built their wealth on the backs of common people, and these ugly stereotypes were used to justify their mistreatment. Vladek’s character is more complex than the stereotype, however. He proves himself heroic in many instances, contriving to bring home more food to his family, saving his resources in order to protect his wife Anja from a violent kapo, and in the present day preparing to leave a large inheritance to his son Artie to safeguard his future against calamity. Vladek’s story in Maus suggests that racist stereotypes went beyond unfocused hate and helped justify wide-scale violence against the Jews because they erased the Jews’ humanity.
Vladek’s storyline in the past details how he survived the Holocaust against enormous odds, along with his wife Anja. But the portrayal of his life in the present makes it clear that his survival was only piecemeal. He is often angry in the present day, displaying a short temper with his second wife Mala and often expressing his frustration with his son Artie. Anja’s survival was short-lived, as she died by suicide decades after the end of World War II. During the war, Vladek’s and Anja’s survival teetered on a knife’s edge: any moment could be the one that led to death. The traumas of such uncertainty are never far from the surface in the present day, from Vladek’s inability to throw out any food to his fights about money with Mala. The past has broken Vladek in many ways, making it difficult for him to connect meaningfully with his loved ones.
Each chapter in Maus begins and ends with scenes set in the present day that dramatize Artie’s project to record Vladek’s story and turn it into a comic book. This storyline includes a series of conflicts between Artie and Vladek, demonstrating their tumultuous father-son relationship. Vladek hassles Artie to help around the house, which Artie actively avoids doing. In one memorable moment, Vladek throws out Artie’s jacket because he thinks it is too shabby and pushes his own hand-me-down jacket on Artie. Artie also reveals that the reason he became an artist in the first place was to spite Vladek by choosing a profession that was fundamentally unpractical. The source of the conflicts between Artie and Vladek often boils down to money. That is, Vladek wants to save it, at all costs, and Artie wants to be free to pursue his own desires, regardless of their costs.
Though Maus mainly tells Vladek’s story, Artie’s original hope was also to include his mother Anja’s story. She is no longer alive, having died by suicide, and Vladek can only provide a partial retelling of her story because he wasn’t there for all of it. When Vladek reveals that Anja kept diaries, Artie repeatedly asks to see them. Finally, Vladek admits that he burned the diaries because they were too painful for him after Anja’s death. The long-simmering tension between Artie and Vladek erupts with Artie calling Vladek a murderer for destroying Anja’s diaries. Artie’s project is blocked by both his mother’s absence and his father’s decision to destroy what little remained of her.
Ultimately, however, Artie’s largest struggle in retelling Vladek’s history is his sense of his own failings. He bemoans that he does not understand Vladek or the Holocaust. He questions if the comics format could ever be sophisticated enough to convey the complexity of the account. He feels guilty for writing Maus and profiting from it when he himself did not survive the Holocaust. Even before attempting to tell his father’s story, as a child he sometimes wished he had been in Auschwitz with his parents, so he could understand their experiences better. Artie’s torturous artistic process reveals yet another way that the trauma of the Holocaust haunts the present, in his difficulty connecting to and understanding Vladek.
Though Maus is subtitled A Survivor’s Tale, the book interrogates the many ways Vladek did not survive intact. He is unhappy and dissatisfied with his life, though he does love Artie and loved Anja dearly, also. Anja similarly survived the Holocaust, but the cost to her was anguish intense enough to prompt her to take her own life. In the depiction of Artie’s artistic process, it also suggests that Artie’s survival was impacted, as he himself struggles with depression and has difficulty connecting with his father. Maus argues that the present is inescapably shaped by the past. And when that past is as drenched in trauma as the Holocaust is, it is nearly impossible to outrun.
