#9: Holes and Untied Strings

     I also encountered a few holes or unresolved storylines in MAUS.  One such hole was with Vladek's family while he was drafted to war.  While he was a Polish soldier and held captive in a P.O.W. camp by the Germans, how did his wife Anja fare?  They just stayed at home from the the book implies.  Richieu, their first son, also grows up in this hole, and is 2 when Vladek returns.  The book also never states how long Vladek was gone in the first place.
     Another storyline that I wish was expanded upon was with Tosha and her children.  Tosha was in the Zawiercie ghetto with her two daughters and Vladek's son Richieu.  The Nazis came and wiped the ghetto clean, taking prisoners to concentration camps.  Tosha, who always kept a vial of poison around her neck, poisoned herself, her two daughters, and Richieu.  She didn't want them to go to the gas chambers at Auschwitz, and she knew they probably wouldn't survive the rest of the war, so she ended their lives and her own to prevent any more suffering.  I am wondering why she took such a drastic move.  The book does not state how much a chance they would have had to survive, but it must have been low for her to make such a decision.  I would like to have known what happened before and after that event...how did Tosha fare with the kids, and how were they found when she killed themselves?

#8: Expanded Thoughts

     Now that I've finished MAUS, my perspective on World War II has changed.  I've learned about WWII in past classes and I've read other accounts of the Holocaust by other survivors.  However, this novel has given me a new way to look at it all.  While books like Night, The Diary of Anne Frank, and Number the Stars give vivid descriptions of how Jews were treated in the 1930's and 40's, MAUS takes the cake in mental images.  The illustrations, although not drawn by an actual survivor, reflect deeply on the story that Vladek Spiegelman tells his cartoonist son.  The drawings gave me a new insight as to how brutal the situation was in Poland and in Auschwitz.  Trickery, violence, and death are all shown in the graphical nature of this novel, through both direct representations and symbolism.  This style of writing and illustrating has helped me conjure a better mental image than other WWII/Holocaust books have.  I now understand just how terrifying the Nazis were, and the horrors that awaited millions of Jews.

     A memorable part of MAUS was the climax of the entire first book.  Vladek and Anja make a deal with smugglers to help them escape Poland and move to Hungary.  However, the smugglers end up betraying them and handing them over to the Gestapo.  The story goes like this:

"All of us together started on our journey...We traveled less than an hour 'till we came to Bielsko-Biala.  Here I used to have my factory, and here the smugglers disappeared.
It was a big commotion...Gestapo came on every side.  In Katowice, it was only to THEM the smugglers phoned."
[A Nazi screams "HERE THEY ARE!" while ripping off Vladek's pig mask.  Vladek and Anja look horrified.]

     This passage is worth remembering because this is the turning point of Vladek's tale.  Before this point, he and his wife only tried to escape the Nazi's influence.  Now, they will face the brutal treatment handed out at Auschwitz concentration camp (continued in Book 2).