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Summary
The next time Artie visits, Vladek and Mala hassle him for not finishing his dinner, and Artie remembers that his father did the same thing to him growing up. After the meal, Vladek starts to complain about Mala, but Artie cuts him off and asks him to pick up the story where he left off.
Vladek says that his own father spent many years in the Russian army, so when he suspected that Vladek and his brothers were going to be drafted, he starved them so that they wouldn’t pass the physical. A year later, Vladek decides that he would rather be drafted than face starvation again, so he’s drafted into the reserves and trained for eighteen months. When Vladek is called up for World War II in 1939, he’s only given a few days of training, then he marches out with the Polish army to fight the Nazis.
In September 1939, Vladek is shooting at Germans troops from a trench, and he kills a German soldier who is camouflaged as a tree. Soon after, Vladek and the other Polish soldiers are taken captive by Nazi soldiers and forced to carry wounded Nazis. Vladek sees the ID tag of the man he killed and discovers that his name was Jan.
Jewish soldiers are separated from the other Polish prisoners of war. The Nazis say the Jews are responsible for the war. A soldier forces Vladek to hand over his money and invokes antisemitic stereotypes by suggesting Vladek has grown rich without doing any work. The Jewish soldiers endure harsher conditions than other prisoners of war; they’re forced to live in tents and are given fewer rations. Vladek keeps himself healthy by doing gymnastics and trying to bathe often. He receives a care package from his family, including cigarettes he trades for food.
The Nazis post a sign stating that any prisoner of war can get better housing by volunteering to work in Germany, and many of the Jewish prisoners think it’s a trick. Vladek, however, signs up because he wants to be treated “like a human being.” He’s transported to Germany with other prisoners, and though the living conditions are better, they’re forced to dig all day. Vladek has a dream in which his grandfather tells him that he will be set free on Parshas Truma (a specific Saturday named for the section of the Torah that is read that day).
Several months later on Parshas Truma, Vladek and the other Jewish prisoners are sent back to Poland. In the frame story, Vladek explains that Parshas Truma also marked the weeks he married Anja, Artie was born, and Artie had his bar mitzvah. Vladek’s story continues, and the train bypasses Sosnowiec and travels 300 miles farther to Lublin. Vladek finds out that their status as Polish prisoners of war temporarily affords them some protection; once they’re released in Lublin, they’re no longer soldiers, and as “Jews of the Reich” they can be summarily executed. After some men bribe the guards, Vladek is released and stays with family friends.
Vladek travels back to Sosnowiec by train and disguises himself as a Pole. He wears a pig mask and his Polish army uniform. The train conductor offers to hide him from the Nazis when they cross the border. He visits his parents and learns that the Nazis forced his father, a deeply religious man, to shave his beard. Finally, he joyfully reunites with Anja and Richieu, who is now two and half years old.
Back in the present, Vladek wishes Anja were still alive and bemoans how Mala is always talking about money and his will. Vladek says that he is holding onto his money so he can pass it down to Artie. Artie is getting ready to leave his father’s house but can’t find his coat. His father admits that he threw Artie’s coat away because it was too shabby, and he gives Artie another coat that doesn’t fit. Confused and incredulous, Artie leaves.
Analysis
Food and hunger form an important motif throughout Maus, highlighting the graphic novel’s exploration of what it means to be human. Chapter Three begins with Vladek, Mala, and Artie sharing a meal, signifying a coming together. But that meal is haunted by Vladek and Mala’s experiences of hunger and starvation in the Holocaust. Vladek’s lifelong insistence that Artie must always finish everything on his plate is both another example of the pair’s strained father-son relationship and the way Vladek’s personal history bleeds into the present. This strain goes back yet another generation, as Vladek reveals that his own father’s painful experiences in the Russian army pushed him to starve Vladek and his brother in order to keep them out of the army. In the past storyline, we see that Vladek chooses to transfer from the POW camp to a work detail in Germany because he will be better housed and fed. Vladek himself equates the better food and housing with being treated “like a human being.” In each of these moments touching on food and hunger, food is understood to be a human necessity and denying people choices over what they do and do not eat is dehumanizing.
Chapter Three also touches on the Jewish faith and its role in helping Vladek survive. While in the POW camp, Vladek recounts how he prayed with others regularly and dreams of his grandfather, who tells him he will be released from the camp on Parshas Truma. The drawing of Vladek’s grandfather is larger and far detailed more than the other mice depicted in the book. This change in style indicates that the moment has outsize importance. Indeed, Vladek’s dream proves prophetic, and he is freed on Parshas Truma. Throughout his life, this parsha (week of the year) has marked important moments in his life, including his marriage to Anja and the birth of Artie. For an otherwise practical and resourceful man, Vladek’s recognition of this week and its repetitions in his life is quasi-mystical. It suggests that faith in the future was an important element of surviving the Holocaust.
For the first time in Chapter Three, we see Vladek wearing a mask to hide who he is. Masks appear throughout Maus, with various mice characters wearing pig masks in order to hide their Jewish identity and pass as Poles. Previous pages show mice wearing Stars of David on their jackets, signaling that Nazis had already begun their project of marking and isolating Jews. Vladek recognizes that if he wants to get home, he must hide his identity. He smartly disguises himself in his Polish army uniform, and the pig mask he ties across his face symbolizes his decision to hide that he is Jewish from the Polish train conductor. Vladek’s deception goes down easily, illustrating that Jews and Poles are not really all that different from one another. Ironically, Vladek’s pig mask highlights that people are much more alike than they are different. The symbolism of the mask stands in counterpoint to the dehumanization of Jews in Nazi propaganda and ideology.
Maus questions the many things that can be passed down as an inheritance from one generation to another. As depicted in the opening scene, dysfunctional ideas about food and hunger have been passed down through multiple generations of the Spiegelman family. At the end of the chapter, Vladek pivots back to criticizing Mala, specifically the way she is always talking about money and Vladek’s will. Artie does not want to get roped into a conversation about money, but before the conversation ends Vladek says that he is saving his money for Artie. In other words, Vladek is not denying Mala just so he can be cheap with her. He wants to leave something of value to his son, echoing his own father-in-law’s desire to help Vladek with the factory in order to provide for his grandchild. Money again symbolizes care and security, passed down from father to son.
