Any person of Jewish descent that lived in Germany or Poland in the late 1930’s and 1940’s lived with a constant fear of being discovered, which caused a Jew’s life to consist solely of hiding from the ruthless Nazi campaign. These grim times pressured countless Jews to alter their appearance and lifestyle in order to blend in with the non-Jewish crowd. Acts of concealment were displayed particularly effectively in Art Spiegleman’s Maus: A Survivors Tale. Spiegleman’s 296-page graphic novel got published in 1991 after releasing small pieces of his work through from 1980 to 1991 in the magazine Raw. Through the visual support of a graphic novel, Spiegleman portrayed his father, Vladek’s survival stories of the holocaust using: Jews as mice, …show more content…
Vladek wore appropriate non-Jewish clothing, representing that he lived under Polish culture, while Anja still wore Jewish clothes, symbolizing her more traditional Jewish cultural behaviors. Vladek’s pig mask assists him in obtaining food from a “black market” vendor in Poland (Spiegleman, 138). Even though Vladek dons the pig mask, he still needs to venture out in the dark of the night for the simple action of acquiring food, which shows the disguises fail to work as efficiently in a setting with more light and clarity. Before he attains the food, Vladek runs into another Jew also concealed by a pig mask, and this Jew had been hiding for over a year (Spiegleman, 138). When the fellow Jew in the pig mask comes across Vladek, he seems a little surprised to encounter Vladek, which shows that even though he succeeds at hiding from the malicious Nazi’s, his contact with other Jews has been limited. Vladek camouflages himself with the pig mask to sneak onto a train in plain sight, and he chooses a German car over a Polish car, for “in the Polish car they could smell if a Polish Jew came in” (Spiegleman,