payment page
Summary
This chapter begins with Artie sitting behind a drafting table; he is illustrated as a human wearing a mouse mask. He states that Vladek died of heart failure in August of 1982. He then lists many significant dates in no apparent order:
May 1987, Françoise and Artie are expecting a baby
May 16 – 24th 1944, over 100,000 Hungarian Jews were killed in Auschwitz.
September 1986, the first part of Maus was published and was extremely successful.
May 1968, Artie’s mother killed herself.
The next illustration is a horrifying one: there are emaciated mouse corpses piled around Artie’s drafting table, and various reporters and businessmen wearing animal masks harass Artie with questions about Maus. He grows smaller with each panel, eventually turning into a small child. After the others leave, the child version of Artie goes to his psychiatrist, Pavel, who is a Czech Jew and an Auschwitz survivor.
Pictured as a young child, Artie sits and talks to his psychiatrist, Pavel, about Vladek. He expresses his feeling that no matter how successful he is, everything he does seems insignificant compared to surviving Auschwitz. When Artie asks if Pavel feels any guilt for surviving Auschwitz, Pavel says that he only feels sadness. Artie says he’s scared to continue working on the next section of his book, which will require him to draw Auschwitz and the tin shop at which his father worked. Pavel tells him what tools to draw in the tin shop, and Artie leaves. As Artie walks down the street, away from his psychiatrist’s, he becomes an adult again.
In the next scene, an adult Artie sits at his drafting table and listens to a conversation he recorded with his father when they were in the Catskills. As his father rants about Mala on the tape, Artie shrinks to the child version of himself again.
The story shifts back to Vladek’s memories. He recalls the manager of the tin shop, a Russian Jew named Yidl. As a communist, Yidl dislikes Vladek and calls him a capitalist, because Vladek once owned factories. One of the other tin workers tells Vladek that Yidl likes presents, so Vladek trades clothes for food and brings it to Yidl to gain favor. Vladek notes that Yidl was greedy, always taking as much food as he could. Since there was very little food for the normal prisoners, many of them starved.
Artie asks about Anja’s time at Auschwitz, and Vladek tells him that she was sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau, a larger camp two miles away. While Vladek’s camp primarily housed prisoners on work detail, Vladek says that Birkenau was used to hold prisoners who were waiting to be killed.
Vladek recalls meeting Mancie, a female prisoner from Birkenau who oversaw a work crew of other women. He tells her about Anja, and Mancie later reports that while Anja is struggling mentally and physically, she is alive and is relieved to hear from Vladek. In the frame story, Artie asks Vladek about the camp orchestra at Auschwitz, but Vladek says that he doesn’t know anything about an orchestra.
When the S.S. orders a crew from the tin shop to fix roofs in Birkenau, Vladek volunteers to go. Vladek sees Anja several times at Birkenau, but only in passing. He tells her to keep food for herself and not share with her friends. When he is caught talking to Anja on his way to fix a roof, a guard grabs Vladek and beats him brutally.
Vladek is sent to the camp hospital, which serves only to condemn weak and injured prisoners to death. Vladek says that he was twice inspected by Dr. Mengele but was passed over for dreaded selection and returned to his barracks.
As Yidl expects constant gifts, Vladek arranges to be a shoemaker. He works in a small room, away from the main shoe shop. When asked to repair an S.S. officer’s boot, Vladek pays one of the more experienced workers to teach him to make the shoe look as good as new. The officer is so pleased that he gives Vladek a whole sausage.
Vladek discovers that new buildings are being built to house women from Birkenau. Vladek asks the kapo he knows if it would be possible to have Anja transferred, but the kapo tells him it would cost a fortune in bribes. Anja is suffering under a sadistic kapo at her barracks, but after she sends the kapo’s boots to be repaired by Vladek, she receives much better treatment.
Vladek finds out that the bribe would cost 100 cigarettes and a bottle of vodka (which is worth 200 cigarettes). Workers were given three cigarettes a day, which could be traded for one day’s ration of bread. Vladek eventually saves enough to pay the bribe, and Anja is transferred to his camp and given a work assignment in a munitions shop. While they can only see each other briefly and through an electric fence, they are relieved to be near one another. Then, Vladek’s shoe shop is closed, and he is sent back to do hard labor. As he loses more and more weight, he begins to worry that he will be chosen for the gas chamber.
Vladek is eventually reassigned to the tin shop. As the Russians begin to invade Poland, Vladek and others are ordered to dismantle the gas chambers; the Nazis hope to rebuild them in Germany and conceal what they had done in Auschwitz. While the prisoners are dismantling the gas chambers, Vladek meets a man who carries corpses from the gas chamber to the ovens, and the man tells Vladek about all of the terrible things he has seen, including burning the bodies of prisoners, both dead and alive.
Vladek’s story comes to an end for the time being, and Artie asks Vladek why more Jews didn’t fight back against the Nazis. Vladek explains that not only were all of the prisoners starving and terrified, but the Nazis would murder 100 prisoners for every rebellious one, effectively destroying their will to resist. After Vladek goes to bed, Françoise and Artie talk about whether they think Mala will return. Artie says that he hopes so, since he doesn’t want to be responsible for his father. They hear Vladek moaning in his sleep, and Artie says that when he was a kid, he thought that’s what everyone sounded like when they slept.
Analysis
Maus was originally published in installments in RAW, a comics magazine that Art Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly founded in 1980. The graphic novel version of Maus was then published in two volumes. Maus I: A Survivor’s Tale: My Father Bleeds History was published in 1986, before Spiegelman had even finished writing and drawing the remainder of the story. Spiegelman and his publisher rushed to publish a portion of Maus because they were afraid that An American Tale, an animated movie about Jewish mice escaping antisemitic violence, would come out first and Maus would appear derivative. As Artie explains at the opening of Chapter Two, Maus Book One: My Father Bleeds History was an enormous success. Maus II: A Survivor’s Tale: And Here My Troubles Began / From Mauschwitz to the Catskills and Beyond was published in 1991.
Chapter Two begins with a series of scenes in which Artie wrestles with his success and his identity. The fist panel of the chapter shows Artie sitting at his drawing table wearing a mouse mask with a cigarette dangling glumly from his mouth. He lists a series of important dates in no particular order. These dates suggest he has psychologically come unstuck from time, living inside his father’s story as an artist while knowing that the story is not his own. In fact, his own story, including the expected birth of his first child, seems to be unspooling around him without his active participation. In this scene, Artie is no longer a mouse but a man in a mouse mask because he feels like an impostor. He did not survive the Holocaust and does not feel entitled to his identity as a Jew. Rather, he feels like he is playing dress up by telling his father’s story and gaining money and critical acclaim. In Vladek’s story, we see people wear pig masks to hide their “mouse,” or Jewish, identities. These masks, however, never change a person’s identity. Artie’s mouse mask is different, acting as a symbol that suggests that his Jewish identity is in fact the disguise. We never learn what is beneath the mask because Artie never takes it off.
Artie’s problem is not simply that he feels like he has appropriated his father’s identity but also that he has profited off the suffering of the Jews. As the panel zooms out, we see that flies are buzzing around Artie’s head because his drawing desk sits atop a pile of dead mouse bodies. The dead mice have skeletally thin human bodies, and a few have their mouths open in V’s of agony. The image suggests that Artie feels like his “critical and commercial success” with Maus is literally built on the suffering and deaths of the Jewish people. As reporters and a salesman swam Artie, he has no idea what they want him to say and he is clearly uncomfortable with making even more money off of Maus. He doesn’t want money, he says, but absolution because he feels complicit in some way by profiting off the Holocaust. The pictures show Artie growing smaller and smaller, until he is boy-sized in his chair and crying for his Mommy. The panels suggest that as much as Artie wants to be forgiven for creating Maus, even more he wishes that the violence had never occurred and he could just have his mother instead.
Chapter Two pokes holes in the logic of the animals that threads throughout Maus while leaving it mostly intact. Artie acknowledges that his animating concept for Maus, that different races are different animals, is a metaphor. He says of the dogs outside his psychiatrist’s office, “Can I mention his, or does it completely louse up my metaphor?” Maus has shown dogs before, undercutting the metaphor of different animals representing different races. But in this instance, Artie draws our attention to it directly. Maus suggests that though racial identity has real world ramifications, it is also a metaphor that humans have created. The Nazis believed in this metaphor so completely that they gave themselves permission to perpetrate genocide. Throughout Vladek’s story in this chapter, we see images of starving mice in Auschwitz, their bodies wasting away to skin and bones. The similarity among the mice characters, where no one mouse is distinguishable from another, highlights the way the Nazis in the concentration camps dehumanized their Jewish prisoners. For the Nazis, each mouse, or Jew, was the same as another, and so they became easier to kill.
Maus draws the reader’s attention to the subjectivity of history with its treatment of the orchestra at Auschwitz. As Vladek tells his story of marching daily to the tin shop, the panel shows a group of mice in striped uniforms marching before a small orchestra that includes a conductor, a bassist, and a few other musicians. Artie asks about this orchestra, having read about it in books, but Vladek says he does not remember such an orchestra. The next panel is almost exactly the same as the panel showing the orchestra, only this time there are twice as many prisoners and the orchestra is obscured. If we look closely, however, we can still see the conductor’s baton and the neck of the bass behind the heads of the prisoners. These two panels suggest that history is subjective and changes based on who tells the story. Though Vladek is the one who was there, Artie ultimately has the last word because he is the one who is writing and drawing the story. Every history is an act of recreation and requires interpretation, often by people who were not present for the events.
