It would take many books, my life, and no one wants anyway to hear such stories.
(I was taking pictures of the chapter illustrations for this comic book because my scanner broke (and then I cleaned them up, pictured above), and then I decided to recommend the book to everyone on tumblr, and then I accidentally history feels’d all over my blog. I disgust myself.)
I visited the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. a year or two ago. The museum itself was fantastic (there was a great propaganda exhibit up when I went). It was also chilling, and the image I remember best is a room full of shoes - just hundreds of shoes, taken from the camps, and then I realized these represented only a tiny, minuscule fraction of the millions of people who were affected by the Holocaust. There was also this quote from Deuteronomy that I read that day, which has stuck with me all this time:
Only guard yourself and guard your soul carefully, lest you forget the things your eyes saw, and lest these things depart your heart all the days of your life, and you shall make them known to your children, and to your children’s children.
At the end of the day, I picked up this graphic novel called Maus. I wasn’t sure what to expect, because the Holocaust is absolutely one of the hardest things to depict in any form of media, without a doubt. Most depictions are accused of being too sappy, or too detached. They show too many facts and not enough humanity. There’s too much sentimentality and not enough historical accuracy. These are legitimate critiques. Maus was different, though. My biggest complaint about the depictions I see are that victims are treated like victims before actual people, and Maus totally avoids this. The Holocaust victim (the author’s father) whose story is being told, is a huge jerk, and Spiegelman does nothing to paint his father in a better light; at the same time, Spiegelman admits that he has no real grasp of what his father went through - and how could he? How could anyone, if he’d never experienced it for himself, know? It’s ironic, I suppose, that a book that depicts all its characters as mice and pigs and cats tells one of the most human accounts of the Holocaust I’ve ever read.
One other refreshing thing about Maus is that Art Spiegelman never forces any morals and messages down the reader’s throat. It is a semi-biographical memoir, and Spiegelman lets his readers interpret as much as they can for themselves. According to the comic, his father has racist tendencies himself, and, although he could easily have done so, Spiegelman doesn’t try to paint him as a pure flawless victim. Some people I know who’ve read the comic have complained about this, about how it was a writing mistake, and how it makes them less sympathetic towards the victim. I wonder, though - how much are these trifling human flaws worth in the face of evil? Should we really take a tragedy so enormous as the Holocaust and say that it should have taught Vladek Spiegelman a “lesson” about racism?
I won’t even begin to comment on what this work did for the comic book genre, either, but suffice it to say, the graphic novel was taken much more seriously afterwards (it was the first graphic novel to win a Pulitzer).
At the end of the comic, Mr. Spiegelman provides some photographs of the human beings depicted in the comic, just in case by the end the reader has forgotten that the entire thing was not just a tragic piece of fiction about mice. And we do forget sometimes that the Holocaust (and genocide and war and slavery and all these seemingly far-off things) actually happened. I feel like we alienate historical events and figures, like they’re all part of particularly realistic pieces of fiction, or at least, I know I do. It’s things like the Holocaust that can’t be effectively captured in even the most high-quality black-and-white photographs; even Art Spiegelman, whose family went through the Holocaust, cannot even begin to fathom what it was like. We can try, though, but it takes more than words. Sometimes it takes a room full of discarded shoes or a poignant comic book.