Summary

Artie receives a worried call from Mala, who says that Vladek is going to try to clean the drainpipes despite his frail health. Artie initially agrees to come and help his father, but then decides he doesn’t want to. When Artie visits a week later, Vladek seems upset. When Artie asks Mala whether his father is mad about the roof, she tells Artie that Vladek recently read Prisoner on the Hell Planet, a comic that Artie drew years earlier.

Prisoner on the Hell Planet: A Case History is a comic that features people instead of animals. Artie is dressed in prison stripes throughout. One day, months after his release from a mental hospital, Artie finds a crowd of people outside his house. A doctor who lives nearby tells Artie that his mother died by suicide. Artie’s father, Vladek, is the one who found Anja’s body. At the funeral, Vladek climbs onto the coffin, wailing. When relatives express their condolences during the next week, Artie feels as though he’s being blamed for his mother’s suicide. The last time he saw her, she came into his room late at night and asked if he still loved her, to which he resentfully replied, “Sure, Ma.” In the last panels, Artie speaks from a prison cell. He accuses his mother of committing the perfect crime: murdering herself and leaving him to take the blame.

Vladek joins Artie and Mala in the kitchen, and Artie apologizes to his father for the comic. Vladek says that it brought up painful memories of Anja, but it was good that Artie found a way to release his emotions. As Artie and Vladek walk to the bank, Vladek resumes his story after the stadium selection.

In 1943, all of the remaining Jews in Sosnowiec are forced to move to Srodula, a nearby village. The Polish citizens of Srodula move into the Jews’ homes in Sosnowiec, and Srodula becomes the Jews’ permanent ghetto. In Srodula, Vladek and the other Jews are escorted by guards to work in German workshops each day. A friend’s visiting uncle, Persis, tells Vladek and Anja that in Zawiercie, where he’s been relocated, he still had some influence. He offers to take Richieu, as well as Tosha and her children, and keep them safe, and Anja’s family agrees. This is the last time that Vladek ever sees Richieu.

In the spring, the Nazis take 1,000 more people—mostly children—from Srodula to Auschwitz. The Germans arrive to transport the entire ghetto of Zawiercie to Auschwitz, and Tosha, wanting to spare them from a terrible fate at Auschwitz, poisons Richieu, herself, and all of her own children before they can be sent to the concentration camp. Vladek only learns of Richieu’s fate much later.

In the present, Vladek uses Artie’s notebook to draw a diagram of the hiding place that he made in Srodula, behind a false wall in the coal cellar. Even when the Nazis brought dogs, they couldn’t find Vladek and Anja behind the false wall. Other Jews, whose hiding places were not as good, were found and taken away.

By the end of July 1943, only 1,000 people are left in Srodula: the rest have been deported to Auschwitz. Vladek and the other remaining families live in an attic bunker and only leave to look for food. One day they help a stranger who stops in their house, and the next day, the Gestapo show up and force everyone out of their hiding place; it turns out that the stranger had been an informant. While awaiting a van that will transport them to Auschwitz, Vladek talks to his cousins Jakov and Haskel; Haskel is the chief of the Jewish police and still has some freedom and influence. Vladek gives Haskel all of his valuables, and Haskel helps Vladek, Anja, and their nephew Lolek escape. Haskel gets Vladek a job at the Braun shoe shop, and takes payment to save Anja’s parents, too. But he doesn’t help them, and they’re taken to Auschwitz a week later. One day while Vladek is on work detail, he ends up burying the body of the informant; Haskel had arranged to have him killed.

In the present day, Vladek tells Artie that Haskel was a crook who gained favor with the Gestapo by playing cards with them and losing large amounts of money on purpose. While Vladek and Artie walk to the bank, Vladeck starts coughing and has to sit down. As he rests, he tells Artie about Pesach, another crook who worked with Haskel. Pesach baked cakes to sell to Jews, but he once used laundry detergent when flour wasn’t available, and many Jews got sick.

The story shifts back to the past. In 1943, almost everyone has been taken to Auschwitz. Haskel’s friend Miloch shows Vladek a secret bunker in the shoe workshop and tells him to be ready to come with Anja and Lolek at a moment’s notice. When Vladek tells Lolek about the hiding place, Lolek refuses to go, saying that he’s tired of hiding. He’s soon taken to Auschwitz, and Anja begins to despair. Her parents, child, and nephew have all been taken from her. Vladek tries to convince her that he still needs her.

Anja and Vladek end up hiding in the bunker with ten other people, including a baby. Pesach comes to visit from his bunker and tells them that his group is bribing the guards to let them leave town. Vladek, Anja, and a few others decide not to go, because they don’t trust the Germans. Their fears prove justified: Pesach and those who leave with him are killed by the guards. The few who remain behind wait until the town is empty, put on nice clothes, and join the Polish citizens walking past the town to work, pretending to be Polish.

In the present, Artie and Vladek arrive at the bank, where Vladek has an extra key to his safety deposit box made for Artie. Vladek shows Artie jewelry that he recovered after World War II, including a diamond ring that he originally gave to Anja. Vladek tells Artie that Mala wants all of his money; when Vladek dies, he wants Artie to take everything in the deposit box before Mala can get it. Vladek breaks down and cries, heartbroken and missing Anja.

Analysis

Chapter Five is framed by two discussions that demonstrate the fraught nature of inheritance. As the chapter opens, we learn how Artie has grown up in opposition to the characteristics Vladek wants him to embody. Artie explains that he didn’t even own a hammer until recently because he could not live up to his father’s own handiness around the house. In fact, Artie became an artist specifically because it was impractical and a way to directly rebel against his father’s need to save money and resources by fixing things himself. Artie refuses to inherit his father’s frugality and practicality. The chapter closes with a scene set in the bank over Vladek’s safety deposit box, which literally contains Artie’s inheritance from Vladek. Vladek again explains that he wants to pass these valuable down to Artie, not Mala. Artie again refuses this inheritance, suggesting instead that Vladek spend his savings on himself.

The inclusion of Prisoner on the Hell Planet raises questions about what it really means to survive a traumatic experience. In the comic, Artie depicts himself as literally imprisoned by his mother’s suicide. He also mentions that he had recently left a state mental institution before his mother’s suicide, suggesting another inheritance he received from his parents: his mother Anja’s depression and anxiety. Anja’s suicide as depicted in Prisoner on the Hell Planet is an echo of her despair in the past storyline in Maus, where she tells Vladek directly that she does not want to live and wants to die. Part of what drives her to wish for death is the suicide of her own sister-in-law, who poisoned herself, her children, and Richieu in order to save them from the horrors of Auschwitz. The trauma of the Holocaust, it is suggested, never left Anja. Suicide itself appears self-perpetuating, with one person’s suicide causing such anguish in a loved one that they, too, commit suicide, as Anja did, or feel hopelessly trapped in their own depression and anxiety, as does Artie in Prisoner on the Hell Planet. Both Anja and Artie may have initially survived their respective traumas, but those traumas haunt them. They have not survived unscathed.

The logic of the animal metaphor that unites Maus breaks down multiple times in Chapter Five. In the first instance, Prisoner on the Hell Planet depicts all the characters as people. But even those people are drawn in an exaggerated style. The first page of Prisoner on the Hell Planet, however, includes a photograph of Anja and Artie as a young boy. This photograph emphasizes that though the characters are presented as caricatures inside the comic, they are, in fact, real people. The animal metaphor breaks down again, briefly, when the Nazis bring dogs to sniff out the bunker beneath the coal bin. These dogs are not anthropomorphized, wearing clothes and walking on two feet. They are dogs on leashes. But their inclusion in the comic highlights that the cats who hold their leashes and the mice they are trying to sniff out are not, in fact, animals. They are human characters. This literary device allows Maus to draw the reader’s attention to the social construction of race. Just as Artie draws people as animals, society categorizes people into different races. But just as Jews and Germans are not different animal species, people of different races are not biologically different. Our differences are stories we tell about ourselves and about each other. Maus therefore undercuts the dehumanization inherent in the Nazi project of genocide. As readers, we are forced to remember that both the German soldiers and the Jews who are hiding are people.

Vladek defines a kombinator as a person who is hatching schemes when he describes Haskel and Pesach, two friends of his who were in the Jewish police force. The characterization of Pesach, especially, highlights the differences between Vladek’s schemes and those of the antisemitic stereotype of the Jew as a crook and a schemer. Pesach uses laundry detergent in place of flour to trick Jews into buying pieces of cake, and this scheme hurts his own people. Haskel’s schemes are similarly self-serving, but do not always hurt others. He purposefully loses card games to Nazi soldiers in order to get on their good side and acquire favors, which he uses to help himself and others. However, Haskel also takes Vladek’s money to help Anja’s parents but never actually helps them, thus serving himself and hurting his own people. Spiegelman’s inclusion of these characters is similar to his insistence on depicting Vladek as stingy and miserly. Maus insists that people are real and flawed, but their flaws make them no less deserving of being treated like humans or having their stories faithfully told.

The end of the chapter again shows mice wearing pig masks. After escaping the Nazis once again, Vladek, Anja, and others who they were hiding with disguise themselves as Poles, wearing good clothes and pig masks. One panel shows Anja and Vladek walking along a path that is shaped like a swastika. In the narration, Vladek says they had nowhere to go. The path illustrated as a swastika implies that, at this point in time, all paths lead to the Nazis. Even though they are disguised as Poles, there is now nowhere they can go without such a disguise.