Summary

Artie visits his father regularly over the next few months to hear more stories. One day, he asks Vladek about Anja’s old boyfriends. The story shifts to Vladek’s memories.

As Vladek heads home one day, he hears that the police have arrested a local seamstress. Anja’s parents tell Vladek that Anja has been translating secret communist messages for her ex-boyfriend, and that to avoid being arrested, Anja gave the documents to a seamstress. The Polish police, depicted as pigs, found the documents and arrested the seamstress, though she is freed three months later. Vladek tells Anja that he’ll end their marriage if she continues working with communists.

Anja’s father helps Vladek buy a textile factory in Bielsko in order to ensure any future grandchild would be well provided for, and a few months later in October 1937, Vladek’s first son, Richieu, is born. Vladek runs the factory during the week and comes back to Sosnowiec to visit Anja and Richieu on the weekends. One day while at the factory, he receives a call that the strain of childbirth was too much for Anja. She is depressed and doesn’t want to live anymore. Vladek takes Anja to a sanitarium in Czechoslovakia, and Anja’s family looks after Richieu and the factory.

In 1938, while riding on the train to the sanitarium, Vladek sees a Nazi flag for the first time. Other Jews on the train tell Vladek that the Nazis, depicted as cats, are arresting Jewish people and taking over Jewish businesses. The sanitarium is much like a resort; Vladek and Anja have their own room and go dancing every night. After three months, Anja is fully recovered, and she and Vladek return to Poland.

While they were away, Vladek’s factory in Bielsko was robbed. Anja’s father helps him rebuild, and soon the two have a nice apartment there, along with household staff, including a Polish governess. Antisemitic sentiment is rising in Bielsko, with riots growing more common. In August of 1939, Vladek receives a letter notifying him that he’s been drafted by the Polish army. While he goes to the frontline to fight the Nazis, Anja’s parents take her and Richieu to Sosnowiec.

The story shifts back to the present, and Vladek tells Artie about his vision problems; his left eye hemorrhaged at one point and had to be replaced with a glass eye. Artie has heard the story before and is relieved to stop for the day because his hand hurts from taking so many notes.

Analysis

Maus symbolizes the conflict between Jews and German Nazis by depicting the two racial groups as two animals that are by their nature in conflict: cats and mice. The Holocaust was an explicitly genocidal project in which the Nazis, Germany’s ruling political party, tried to kill all Jewish people (as well as people with disabilities and gay people, among others). Nazi propaganda often depicted Jews as mice or rats, referring to them as vermin in need of extermination. Maus adopts this symbolism but insists on humanizing Jews instead of dehumanizing them, as Nazi propaganda did. The book shows the Nazis as cats, who are natural hunters and take pleasure in hunting and killing mice. Thus, the conflict between cats and mice comes to highlight the humanity of the Jews while showing how German soldiers had to dispense with their own humanity and become remorseless and violent to fulfill the dictates of genocide.

The Nazi imagery in Chapter Two foreshadows the violence and degradation to come. As another train passenger tells Anja and Vladek stories about the Nazis in Germany, the comic panels show a series of scenes depicting cruel Nazi soldiers with a large swastika in the background. In one panel, a mouse with his head down holds up a sign that reads, “I am a filthy Jew,” highlighting the connection in Nazi propaganda between Jews and mice, which were considered unclean and vectors of disease. In another panel, a German soldier holds up a club to strike a Jewish person, and his cat face looks skeletal, as if he were a monster in a horror film. In the final panel, a swastika fills the entire sky above a street with a banner that reads “This town is Jew Free.” In the image, the swastika looks like a sun rising over the town, suggesting that Nazi power is only just beginning.

In Chapter Two, we also see Poles illustrated as pigs. According to the Jewish laws of kosher, which dictate what Jews can and cannot eat and how to prepare food, pork is not an acceptable meat. Depicting the Poles as pigs suggests that even though they are not direct enemies of the Jewish people, they are not natural allies either. The first pigs we see are police officers who threaten Anja and her family and arrest her seamstress, suggesting their role is to enforce law and order.

Money and wealth play an important role in Maus. Anja’s father is a rich man, and his care for family is evidence in how he spends that wealth. He helps his daughter Anja recover from her “breakdown” after the birth of Richieu by send her and Vladek to a sanitorium and hiring a governess to care for their son. Vladek’s success in business is thanks to his father-in-law’s wealth, as well, because his father-in-law both finances his textile factory and helps him rebuild after it is robbed. Vladek says that his father-in-law gave this financial assistance because he wanted to be sure his grandchild was well taken care of. Vladek’s father-in-law uses his money to care for his family. In the graphic novel, money is both a resource to be used for survival but also a symbol of care and safety passed from one generation to the next.