Maus I: A Survivor's Tale: My Father Bleeds History by Art Spiegelman


My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Nazi cats and Jewish mice combine to make a heartbreaking and gut wrenching recounting of one family’s experience and survival of the Holocaust
Art Spiegelman intersperses his father's gripping survivor story with their present day uneasy, bickering relationship and through the text and illustrations he shows both the short and long term affects of the atrocities of the Holocaust.
Each scene opens at the elder Spiegelman's home in, N.Y. Art, who was born after the war, is visiting his father, Vladek, to record his experiences in Nazi-occupied Poland. The Nazis, portrayed as cats, gradually introduce increasingly repressive measures, until the Jews, drawn as mice, are systematically hunted and herded toward the Final Solution.
Spiegelman recounts all this without becoming judgmental. The characters have their flaws; in fact you soon forget that they are depicted as animals. Their relationships are intricate – Vladek understands why his Polish protectors sometimes demanded payment and why older people were sometimes given up to the Nazis.
Spiegelman relates the effects of those events on the survivors' later years and upon the lives of the following generation. This book is not only a recounting of a wretched time in history, it is a character study of how people survive personal hardships.

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