Surviving the Holocaust as a Comic Book Art Spiegelman’s MAUS: A Survivor’s Tale is uniquely suitable to study the holocaust and literature because of its innovative qualities such as a graphic novel, its detailed biography of a witness of the Holocaust in Poland, and its complex sroey of that witess as a survivor in the United States.
MAUS: A Survivor’s Tale gives readers new insight into literature because of its form as a graphic novel.
“We don’t need more genteel synonyms. We need to examine and redifine the words we inherit” (Spiegelman “Eyeballs”).
Emotion is being assigned to abstract icons, it has become a predicament.
The word “retarded” symbolizes a mental disorder, but it has been over used, and now carries a meaning of offensive criticism.
“…Working relentlessly to sharpen students’ reading skills…hopes the graphic-novel rage at the school had something to do with it” (Solomon).
Schools are hoping that reading comic books will help students in school, and they are preferred due to their illustrations.
Also, reading, even comic books, will help improve FCAT scores, which will help the school.
Cartoons are especially effective since people can recognize the drawing and characterize it into someone by age, gender, ethnicity, intelligence, and feelings (Spiegelman “Eyeballs”).
Comic strips were made from stereotypes.
Stereotype means to give a solid form to, and was invented as a way of making relief-printing plates.
MAUS: A Survivor’s Tale also serves as an important document of events that happened during the holocaust.
Vladeck started losing hope, and the thought that this time he would die at Auschwitz kicked in (Spiegleman, Maus II 28).
A priest spotted valdeck crying, he read Vladeck’s ID number and guaranteed him that he will live Auschwitz.
Vladeck’s ID number started with 17, which is a good omen, it ended with 13, which is the age in which a jewish boy becomes a man, and it added up to 18, the Hebrew number of life (Spiegelman, Maus II 28).
“It was the begging of 1938 - before the war - hanging high in the center of the town, it was a NAZI flag” (Spiegelman, Maus I 32).

Vladeck and Anja witnessed the “unfolding” of the Holocaust while on a train to the sanitarium.
Jews started becoming more aware of the terrors going on in the Holocaust, even though, for now they kept living their normal lives.
“Maus, my comic book about my parents’ life in Hitler’s Europe that uses cats to represent Germans and mice to represent Jews, was made in collaboration with Hitler” (Spiegelman “Eyeballs”).
Due to Hitler’s actions, Spiegelman was able to write a book about his parents surviving a horrific genocide.
If Hitler had not done what he did, then millions of people would not have died, many would not hold a memory of the Holocaust, and Maus would have never been written.
Apart from being just a story about the Holocaust, however, MAUS: A Survivor’s Tale is also a story about humanity and what is important in the universal struggle to survive.
“Once, in a silent study hall of 100 students, several of them pitcehd pennies around his desk to taunt him…” (Weinraub).
Although, Art spiegelman was not in the Holocaust, he was a survivor as well.
He went through tormentous days where he would be bullied for his ethnic background.
“My daughter! How can she manage alone with four children to take care of?” (Spiegelman, Maus 1 91).
Vladeck’s father could have stayed on the side where they lived, but decided to jump the fence to the side where people die, all to help his daughter.
He gave up his chance at survival for his daughter and grandchildren, without looking back at Vladeck.
“The war put us apart. But always, before and after, we were together” (Spiegelman, Maus II 25).
Vladeck and Anja survived all the hardships thrown at them together, before and after the war, the camps, the depressions, the hidings.
Most of the other survivors were not as lucky, they never saw their loved ones after the war.