Summary

Artie sits at his drawing desk listening to the tape recording of Vladek’s story. He tells Françoise he has over 20 hours now. The conversation turns to Vladek, and Françoise says that they could invite him to live with them, but Artie doesn’t want his father to move in. Mala calls from Florida and says that she is back together with Vladek, but she’s very worried about his health. He has been hospitalized several times recently because he has fluid in his lungs, but he insists on going to the hospital in New York. Artie flies down to Florida to help Mala, and arranges a flight back to New York for himself and Vladek. Mala says that she got back together with Vladek after he called her from the hospital in Florida, but she is still frustrated with him.

The next morning, Vladek and Artie sit outside. Vladek describes leaving Poland for Sweden after the war and living there while waiting to get citizenship in America. (Swedes are represented as deer people.) He lives in Sweden for a few years and works in a department store, where he uses his business acumen to sell “unfashionable knee-length stockings” that nobody had been able to sell.

Vladek and Artie fly back to New York. At LaGuardia Hospital, a doctor tells Artie that Vladek is improving and is healthy enough to return home. A month later, Artie visits Vladek in Rego Park. Mala tells Artie that Vladek is having memory problems and is not doing well physically, either. Artie sits with his father and asks what happened at the end of the war.

When Vladek’s story picks up, he and Shivek are sent to a refugee camp in Garmisch-Partenkirchen. Vladek has a relapse of typhus and has to spend several days in the infirmary. A year later, he finds out that he is also diabetic. Shivek convinces Vladek to travel north to Hannover, Germany, where Shivek’s brother lives. Shivek and Vladek ride a freight train and pass Nuremberg and Würzburg, both of which have mostly been reduced to rubble from bombings. In Hannover, Vladek and Shivek stay with Shivek’s brother’s family. Vladek tells them that he is going back to Sosnowiec; he and Anja planned to meet there if they were separated, but he doesn’t think that she survived Auschwitz. Shivek’s wife advises Vladek to check in Belsen, where many Jewish refugees had congregated.

In Belsen, Vladek sees some people that he recognizes from before the war, and they tell him not to go back to Sosnowiec, because Polish people are still killing Jews there. Vladek also learns that Anja is still alive, and that she has returned to Sosnowiec.

In Sosnowiec, Anja checks at the Jewish Organization every day for messages from Vladek. She even visits a fortune-teller (a Roma woman who is represented as a moth person). The fortune-teller tells her that Vladek is sick but still alive, and he will take her on a ship to a faraway place where they will have another son. Eventually, Anja receives a letter from Vladek explaining that he’s in Germany and has typhus, but that he is coming home soon. Vladek includes a photograph in the letter.

Shivek and Vladek travel to Poland but become separated. Since some of the train tracks are destroyed, Vladek has to walk part of the distance, and it takes him over three weeks. When he arrives in Sosnowiec, he is happily reunited with Anja.

In the present, Artie sits beside Vladek’s bed, recording the last of the story. Vladek says that he is tired and asks Artie to turn off the tape recorder, accidentally calling him “Richieu.” The last panel is a double headstone with these names and dates:

Vladek, Oct 11, 1906 – Aug 18, 1982

Anja, Mar 15, 1912 – May 21, 1968

Beneath the headstone, Art Spiegelman has signed his name and included the dates 1978 – 1991.

Analysis

In many ways, Maus is a love story about Vladek and Anja. Throughout Vladek’s story, he talks about how in love they were and proves his love by repeatedly ensuring Anja’s survival. The second chapter of Book One is “The Honeymoon,” and this concluding chapter is “The Second Honeymoon,” allowing Anja and Vladek to end where they began: in love. In one of the final panels of the book, Vladek even says that they lived “happy, happy ever after” when they are reunited after the end of World War II. In the image, Anja and Vladek embrace in the foreground, and the background is a white circle on black. This image makes it appear as though they are under a spotlight, suggesting their love story is high romance of the kind depicted in movies. But we know that Anja later commits suicide and that Vladek has seemingly rarely been happy. In other words, this version of their love story is fictional, the way movies are. Vladek’s and Anja’s love story is tragic because of both the lasting damages inflicted by the Holocaust and because Vladek, until his dying day, is unable to let go of it even after her death.

The final scene with Vladek illustrates what it means to survive but to survive in pieces. Vladek is physically infirm and his memory is fading. Maus shows his tombstone as the final image, and it hovers in front of the panels. The rest of the panels appear to recede into the past behind that tombstone. When Vladek describes what has happened in Sosnowiec after the war, he is distraught that a Jewish man returned home and was beaten by his Polish neighbors. “For this he survived,” Vladek says, highlighting that it isn’t enough to survive once but rather people must survive over and over. Similarly, he and Anja successfully survived the Holocaust but were then unable to live happily in the present. In his final words in the book, Vladek mistakes Artie for Richieu, suggesting he is still psychologically living in World War II. Maus is subtitled A Survivor’s Tale, and yet the book ends with a tombstone and the death of the survivors it depicts. Survival is always temporary and always piecemeal, Maus suggests.

This final chapter of Maus continues its investigation of the subjectivity of history. The real photograph that Vladek sends to Anja is included in this book. It is one of only three actual photographs depicted, unlike the photographs that were redrawn to feature mice in Chapter Four. The photograph is a reminder that Vladek was a real, specific human, objectively present during the Holocaust. But even though a photograph seems to be objective proof of what happened, this particular photograph is a recreation. As Vladek explains, he had the photograph taken at a business that dressed people up in clean concentration camp uniforms to pose for souvenir photos. One of the most objective artifacts in the book is thus a subjective interpretation of the concentration camp experience. It cleans up and sanitizes what we know from Vladek’s story to have been a uniquely dehumanizing and squalid experience. Similarly, Vladek’s insistence that he and Anja lived happily ever after cleans up and sanitizes what we know was a difficult life, both during and after the Holocaust. Maus thus simultaneously presents us with a historical account of World War II and the Holocaust while also drawing our attention to the many ways we can never know exactly what occurred. We must be satisfied with the partial stories and interpretations we are given.