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Summary
Artie returns to his father’s house, and Vladek is upset that Artie arrived too late to climb onto the roof and fix the drainpipe. Vladek complains that both Artie and Mala “think money grows on bushes.” Artie turns on his new tape recorder, explaining it was too hard to write everything down, and Vladek picks up his story in 1940. He, Anja, Richieu, and nine other family members are living with Anja’s parents, and they still have a comfortable lifestyle and enough to eat. The Nazis have seized almost all Jewish-owned businesses including Vladek’s factory, and they steal some of Anja’s parents’ expensive furniture as well. Jews are given ration books with which to purchase food, but the limited number of coupons barely provide enough food for one person, so Vladek starts buying and bartering goods on the black market. In order to avoid arrest and detention by the Nazis, Vladek obtains a work permit from a tin shop, where he learns skills that will later help him at Auschwitz.
A year later, in 1941, the Nazis start rounding up Jews and sending them away on trains even if they have proper papers. Vladek is almost captured but is saved when he sees his business associate Ilzecki, who hides him in his own home. Vladek thinks about hiding Richieu with Ilzecki’s son until the war is over, but Anja talks him out of it. Vladek notes that Ilzecki’s son survived the war, but Richieu did not. A notice is posted and all of the Jews are moved into a ghetto; Vladek’s family of 12 is forced to live in a two-and-a-half room apartment. Several of Vladek’s friends are caught selling goods to people without ration books and are hanged in the public square. Vladek cries as he tells Artie this, saying that he was similarly involved in the black market and did business with two of the men who were hanged. They could have turned him in to save themselves. Despite this, Vladek continues to sell goods on the black market in order to help his family survive.
Artie asks what Anja was doing during this time, and Vladek mentions that she kept extensive diaries. She even wrote her whole story, beginning to end, after the war. Artie asks to see these diaries, but Vladek changes the subject.
Vladek continues his story. When the Nazis order all Jews over the age of seventy to relocate to Czechoslovakia, Vladek helps Anja’s family hide her grandparents in a secret room in their shed. Since Anja’s grandparents never turn up in Czechoslovakia, Jewish police arrest Anja’s father, and the rest of the family is threatened. The grandparents eventually turn themselves in to protect their family from recrimination, and they’re taken to Auschwitz. Vladek explains that he heard stories about Auschwitz immediately but few people believed them because they were too horrific.
Later, all of the Jews in Sosnowiec are told to report to the nearby Dienst stadium to have their papers verified. At the stadium, Vladek, Anja, and Anja’s parents get their papers stamped and are sent to the right. Fela, Vladek’s sister, is told to go to the left with her four children. Vladek’s father joins Fela, despite being cleared to go to the right; he, Fela, and Fela’s children are never seen again.
Back in the present, Artie talks to Mala as he leaves his father’s house. She tells him that her family was also at the stadium, and they were eventually killed in Auschwitz. Artie goes to the bookshelf and looks for some diaries that his mother kept after the war, but he can’t find them. Mala tells him to put everything back exactly as it was, or else she’ll be scolded by Vladek.
Analysis
The Holocaust was the systemic attempt by Nazi Germany to kill all Jewish people and the culmination of centuries of discrimination against and oppression of Jewish people. Many European Christians, of all nationalities, blamed the Jews of Europe for the death of Jesus Christ. They also believed Jewish people were greedy capitalists who built their wealth on the backs of common people. These prejudices and stereotypes made it possible for Hitler and other Nazi officers to attempt to imprison and deport all the Jews in Europe and ultimately, to attempt the genocide of the Jewish people. Over six million Jewish people (along with millions of others, including Nazi Germany’s political opponents, the Roma people, people with disabilities, and gay people) died during the Holocaust.
Surviving World War II and the Holocaust required a combination of resourcefulness and luck for Jewish people. Vladek provides several examples of his own resourcefulness in Chapter Four, detailing various businesses he ran on the black market. He acquires official business papers that state he works in a tin shop, when in reality he is trading cloth, sugar, and eventually valuables like jewelry and watches. Vladek has a keen business sense and understands what others find valuable and how to deliver that to them. This allows him to bring home extra money, and thus extra food, to supplement the meager rations the Nazis allowed Jews. A common antisemitic stereotype depicts all Jewish people as schemers. In Chapter Four, Vladek on the surface fits this stereotype, running a number of clever schemes. But Maus resists the caricature of Vladek as deceitful or dishonest. His schemes do not deceive the people with whom he trades. Rather, Vladek’s schemes find ways around the oppressive laws and regulations designed by Nazis to deny Jewish people fair treatment. In Maus, it is the Nazis who cheat Jewish people out of their own earnings and wealth. Further, the stereotype of the scheming, capitalist Jew helped enable the oppression of the Jewish people.
Vladek’s business sense and resourcefulness is not enough to help him escape increasing levels of violence, and he is also rescued by luck more than once. When the Nazis are rounding up Jews, including both people with and without working papers, Vladek knows he is in trouble. In a panel shaped like the Star of David, Vladek stands, wearing a jacket with a small Star of David attached to it, frozen in fear. This panel highlights that Vladek’s Jewish identity alone has put him in a spotlight. He luckily spots his business associate Ilzecki, who hides him until the danger passes. Later, Ilzecki offers to hide Richieu along with his own son, but Anja refuses. Vladek comments that even though Ilzecki and his wife did not survive the Holocaust, their son did. Richieu, however, did not. Maus again suggests that the difference between Ilzecki’s son and Richieu comes down only to luck.
As the chapter title “The Noose Tightens” suggests, Vladek and his family’s ability to escape Nazi cruelty and violence grows ever more circumscribed as time goes on. One day, Vladek hears about Jews who were arrested for dealing goods without coupons, which is exactly what he has been doing. In a panel that takes up half the page, we see the four men hanging over the street where they were left for a week. The men haunt Vladek, as implied by the size of the panel and another panel on the next page where the faces of the hanged men hover above Vladek’s head. Again, the simplified style of the mouse drawings highlights the humanity of these men. We see their dress shoes, an all-to-human detail, and know that these were men like any others. Their faces betray the anguish of being hanged to death, their mouths open in gasps or screams. Vladek understands that he survived because they did not turn him in; he has been lucky again.
In the frame story, Artie continues to ask about Anja’s story and learns that she kept diaries throughout her life. These diaries serve as a symbol of Anja’s life throughout Maus. Artie wants to see them because he cannot talk to her the way he does with Vladek due to her suicide. Vladek reveals that Anja wrote her story from start to finish after the war, but changes the subject when Artie displays his excitement and asks to see them. Just as Anja remains elusive in the text because she is dead, access to her diaries continues to elude Artie.
