"Maus II" by Art Spiegelman

BOOK TITLE: Maus II: A Survivor’s Tale: And Here My Troubles Began

AUTHOR: Art Spiegelman

YEAR: 1991

GENRE: Graphic Novel

SUBGENRE: Holocaust Memoir

GRADE: A

Under no circumstances should this memoir be banned from school libraries, or anywhere else for that matter. Yes, it is an insanely uncomfortable read. It shows Jewish mice being burned in ovens, beaten, starved, traumatized, shot, all in the name of blind bigotry by the Nazi regime. This book is disturbing, disgusting, and horrifying all at once. You know why that is? Because the Holocaust was disturbing, disgusting, and horrifying all at once. This is probably the most honest portrayal of history’s worst behavior you’ll ever see. It’s honest because the author’s father experienced it all. There are no punches pulled. There is no sugar-coating or whitewashing. Just brutal honesty, because the subject matter will always be brutal no matter which angle you look at it from. A sanitized version wouldn’t have had the same emotional impact. When I read up to page 75, I was so disturbed by the Nazis’ violence that I got dizzy afterwards. I’ve been disturbed lots of times, but this is the first time it has ever made me light-headed. To all the people wanting to ban this book for “naked mice” and “swearing”, it was never about those things. The book bans have more to do with suppressing important messages and keeping the masses ignorant so that they’ll be more likely to vote for people who care only about making themselves richer.

Equally heartbreaking was watching Art Spiegelman’s mental process throughout creating this comic in his father’s honor. He had over twenty hours of tape-recorded conversations with his father and it wore on him after a while. Impostor Syndrome crept up on him for not being “realistic” enough or “doing him justice”. The secondhand trauma also sent him into a depressive spiral. The constant questions and prying from the media made him want to bawl his eyes out like a child crying out for his mommy, a Holocaust-surviving mommy who killed herself because of overwhelming PTSD. It’s a lot to take in all at once, not just for the reader, but also for the author. If Art was a fictional character, he would be instantly praised as being three-dimensional. His father would receive such praise as a character as well, doing what he had to do to survive the concentration camps while starving to death and being sick with Typhus. It doesn’t matter what page you turn to in this graphic novel, because there will never not be a heartbreaking moment to read about.

Let’s talk for a little bit about Art Spiegelman’s choice to use anthropomorphic animals to depict various ethnicities. It is called Maus, after all. He chose mice to represent Jewish people, because rodents were a common slur for Nazis to use. The Germans soldiers, of course, were depicted as cats, notorious hunters of rodents. Americans were depicted as dogs, playing into that old trope of dogs and cats not getting along. These aren’t the only examples, but using animals is a genius move on the author’s part. It’s not just an attempt at being cute; these animals have symbolic meanings. Every choice Spiegelman made in this novel had a purpose of some kind; nothing was left to chance. As pressured as he was to get his father’s story out there, no one can accuse the author of not knowing what he was doing. That is the mark of any good author: when everything has a reason for being there.

Maus II is easily the most frightening book I’ve ever read. I’ve read plenty of fictional horror stories and bloody fantasy novels over the years, but this is nonfiction in its rawest state. This isn’t a 140-page edge-fest; this topic was handled with great sensitivity despite its horrifying nature. I would advise anybody reading this review or either of the Maus books to handle the Holocaust with sensitivity as well. Edgy alt-right jokes are not funny and I don’t want them anywhere near me. The ones who punch down like that have never had a single hardship in their lives, let alone anything equivalent to living in a concentration camp. Maybe the Maus series will make SJW’s out of us all and I’d be very much onboard with that. Five stars out of five is what this graphic novel gets.