This anti-Polish propaganda is very subtle...but that is what makes it so effective and disturbing. For example, the book represents Jews as mice, Germans as cats, and Poles as pigs. Portraying Poles as pigs does two things. First, it is a negative slur for obvious reasons. Second, it gives the impression that only Jews were victims of the Germans and that Poles were bystanders or accomplices since cats eat mice instead of pigs. In addition, the Polish characters either don't help Jews or turn them in. Finally, the author omits important historical facts (obtained from sources below) about Poland during WWII to help support his propaganda such as:

* Out of 6 million Polish citizens murdered by the Germans, 3 million were not Jewish. * Poland was the only occupied country for which Hitler imposed a penalty of death to an entire family for aiding a Jew. One of the main reasons the death penalty was imposed was because many Poles actively helped Jews. * For the first two years of operation, Aushwitz was primarily used for the killing of Poles and not Jews. * "All Poles will disappear from the world...It is essential that the great German people should consider it as its major task to destroy all Poles." -Heinrich Himmler. * The Polish government heavily funded Zegota --an underground organization formed in Poland to assist Jews during WWII. * "More recent research on the subject suggests that 1,000,000 Poles were involved in sheltering Jews, but some authors are inclined to go as high as 3,000,000". -Forgotten Holocaust

After reading MAUS, an uninformed reader will get a false impression that only Jews were murdered by the Germans in concentration camps during WWII. One can get the impression that not a single Pole is killed by the Germans and that Poles either didn't care what was happening to the Jews or actively turned them in. MAUS does a great historical injustice to Poles which were also tortured and murdered like the Jews in the millions. Thousands of Poles were executed for helping Jews...but an average person reading MAUS would never learn that. The only impression MAUS leaves with the reader regarding Poles is of pigs. I find this highly repulsive and bigoted.

The following well documented books provide much more information on the subject: "Forgotten Holocaust: The Poles under German Occupation 1939-1944" by Richard C. Lukas. "Your Life is Worth Mine: How Polish Nuns Saved Hundreds of Jewish Children in German-Occupied Poland, 1939-1945" by Ewa Kurek, Jan Karski. "The Jews and the Poles in World War II" by Stefan Korbonski.


dangerous to use as history   October 3, 1998
 9 out of 29 found this review helpful

I am deeply concerned about people using this comic as a history text. Poland and Polish people hardly deserve to be portrayed as "pigs". It appears that people who love this version of "history as comic" are wilfully blind to the fact that Poles and Polish Jews were murdered in equal numbers by the Germans. In Eastern Poland, where most of the Jewish community resided, the Soviets invaded in 1939 and deported or exterminated the educated Polish populace. The remaining Poles were subjected to extreme terror. To suggest that the Poles were willing accomplices in the destruction of the Jewish people is a liable. One could just as easily write a comic about the occupation of Eastern Poland by the Soviets and cast Jewish people as "pigs". You can imagine the reaction to that. Maus is another example of "acceptable bigotry". "Acceptable" only because the group being liabled is not politcally strong enough to challenge this terrible distortion.


All together now -- a comic book?   January 11, 2001
 8 out of 11 found this review helpful

When I realized that the Pulitzer-prize winning book was a comic book, I nearly put it back on the shelf. Oh sure, I love comics, even "serious" ones like Asterix and Obelix.

But there seemed to be something sacrilegious about writing the story of Holocaust survivors in this genre. Like walking on a grave. Or touching a Torah scroll with bare hands.

So I read it once, and again. An onion, this book is an onion. You peel away one layer only to discover another, and another, and you try in vain to remember what it is that keeps you from crying when you peel an onion.

There is immense pain buried here, agony. The simplicity of Spiegelman's text reminds me a little of Isaac Babel, who wrote of the horrors of the Russian revolution in just as understated a tone. No exaggeration, no padding. After all, how can you pad such awful facts? How can you exaggerate evil?

MAUS is an adult book. Yet bravehearted parents could likely use it as a read-aloud with older children, if they are willing to tackle honest questions and not duck reality. It could be a family experience to remember. If the adults are well equipped with raw courage.

After all, Art Spiegelman was.


Compelling Story - Read it   March 23, 2000
 7 out of 9 found this review helpful

Like Maus I this book can be read in an hour or so. Vladek's story of survival at Auschwitz is incredible. As a baby boomer I didn't live during this era. Having descended from Germans I have studied this period and have wondered how this could have happened. I'm not going to pretend to really understand what happened and what it was like. I have read other personal accounts of the holocaust but due, I guess, to the comic book format I found this much more accessible. We all should understand as much as we can about this horrific period of history. With just a small investment of time Maus I and II will provide to you a dramatic survivor's experience. We should never forget that this actually happened.


The story continues... as does the legacy of the Holocaust   March 29, 2003
 6 out of 7 found this review helpful

The second part of Art Spiegelman's graphic novel Maus picks up where the first part left off. His father Vladek and mother Anja are captured and sent to Auschwitz. However, things aren't well at home. Mala, Vladek's second wife, exasparated at Vladek's tight-fisted controlling ways, leaves him. Artie and his wife Francoise rush over to help him out and during this time, Artie continues the interviews with his father and thence into Maus II.

The path of Artie understanding his father is smoother but at a cost. Following the success of Maus I, Spiegelman depicts a pile of dead Jewish bodies lying under the Artie's writing desk symbolizing how much the history his father has bled from that first volume has seeped into him. He is beginning to understand, but at the cost of emotionally and vicariously going through his father's experiences, for which he has sessions with Pavel, a Czech Jew psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor.

Artie gets more perspective during these sessions with Pavel. He tells Pavel that as a child, he constantly argued with his father, who said that anything he did was nothing compared to surviving Auschwitz. Pavel refers to the psychological concept of transference: "Maybe your father needed to show that he was always right--that he could always SURVIVE-because he felt GUILTY about surviving. ... and he took his guilt on YOU, where it was safe... on the REAL survivor." The argument stands to reason. Vladek survived the death of so much family and friends, as well as the millions he never knew.

We learn more of how Vladek survived Auschwitz. He teaches English to the Polish kapo, who expecting the Germans to lose the war, wants to get in good graces with the Americans. Vladek is thus given better food, a better fitting uniform, and the tip to stand at the far left of the line of prisoners during the labour call. Improved health increased chances of survival and a better mental state.

Vladek has enough chutzpah in his tight-fisted but survivalist ways to exchange used groceries for new ones(!) While in the car waiting for him, Artie and Francoise discuss Vladek. Francoise says: "I'd rather kill myself than live through ... everything Vladek went through. It's a miracle he survived." Artie responds with "In some ways he didn't survive," which is key to the book's theme. Yet drastic saving is one way Vladek survived the war and camps. On the way back from the grocery store, we discover Vladek's racism towards blacks, an example of the victim becoming a victimizer.

Maus is a must-read for a personal instead of abstract, statistical look at the Holocaust. It also brings up post-war genocide. Pavel's contention that people haven't changed rings poignantly. Despite the vow of "never again," genocide has repeatedly happened "yet again": e.g. the Cultural Revolution, the killing fields in Cambodia, the massacre in Rwanda, and the ethnic bloodshed in the former Yugoslavia. Perhaps for racial harmony to become a human instinct, all people need to feel the same way, but the relativistic world of the twentieth and twenty-first century to makes that dream virtually impossible. Pavel's statement that a newer and bigger Holocaust is needed to change people grimly prophesizes World War III, meaning that unless we change, we will all die.