Prisoners on the hell planet

Abstract

Although born after the Shoah was over, many in places far from the sites of the slaughter, the children of Holocaust survivors are also victims. In his two‐part Pulitzer Prize winning work, Maus I, A Survivor's Tale: My Father Bleeds History, and Mans II, A Survivor's Tale: And Here My Troubles Began, Art Spiegelman vividly dramatizes the complex, extremely moving love/hate relationship between himself and his father, Vladek, a survivor of Auschwitz. In the process, he shows how parent/child relations, problematic under the best of conditions, can be mutually devastating when the parents are Holocaust survivors. The two volumes of Maus, which, combined, took the author 13 years to create, are so complex they can be profitably studied on a myriad of levels. Of course, their most outrageous distinction is that Spiegelman (an underground avant‐garde cartoonist) has not only rendered his father's experiences as an extended comic strip, but also has portrayed all the story's characters as animals, with the Jews as mice, the Nazis as cats, and the Poles as pigs^techniques that inevitably sparked controversy, but which enabled the author to create a wholly unprecedented work of art.