The Legacy of Vladek

What I read: I have just finished reading the sequel to Maus which is called Maus II: And Here My Troubles Began.  Chapter 4 is called "Saved" and in it Vladek finally survives the war.  First though, he gets sent to a lake with the other prisoners and it seems like they are all about to get shot.  Luckily the German officers decide to abandon the prisoners and leave them alone.  

Vladek and his friend Shivek run to a barn to hide.  They get found by the Americas, who are drawn as dogs, and are saved by them.  They both start working for the Americans and are treated with respect.  They are basically working as helpers to the American soldiers.

The last chapter of the series is called "The Second Honeymoon."  In this chapter Vladek old again and really weak.  He needs oxygen to help him breathe.  

Vladek tells Art about how after the war ended, he went to Sweden and worked as a salesman there. The Swedish people are drawn as reindeer.  He really likes living in Sweden and would have stayed there.  Later on, we find out that Vladek gets diabetes.  While in Sweden, Vladek finds out that Anja also survived the war and is still in Poland.  He returns to get her and they reunite on the last page of the book.  This is a contrast to seeing their gravestones together, which is that last picture in the book.

What I thought about: I was really struck when Vladek calls his son Art "Richieu" right before he dies.  This shows that Vladek is always sort of living in the past and inside of all the terrible experiences that he went through.  It's right one the last page of the book and can be seen above.  It's pretty sad to think about how Vladek had such a hard life and even right before he dies, he's still struggling with that.  I wonder if all parents who have kids who die feel this way.

I also thought about all of the various groups that were targeted by the Nazis during the Holocaust.  Toward the end of the book, Vladek talks about how Anja went to see a fortune teller to find out about her family's fate during the war.  

The fortune teller is a Romani and she is drawn as a moth.  This is another person who survived the Holocaust. 

There were also gay people who were targeted by the Nazis and they ended up in concentration and death camps, too.  Many gay men and lesbians were also killed.  Gay men were identified with a pink triangle on their clothes and lesbians had to wear a black triangle. 

What I conclude: I'm so glad that I read this book.  I feel like I learned more about the Holocaust and about the ghettos before that even though I already knew quite a lot about this topic.  I feel like this is a much more personal way to learn about this topic instead of reading facts and statistics.  Vladek's story is real and it feels so emotional to read about what he went through.

I was also interested to read about Art and what it was like for him to be raised by two parents who survived the Holocaust.  It seems like that wasn't easy either.  Today Art and his wife Francoise have been together for a long time and they have two adult children. Those children, Vladek's grandchildren, never got to meet Vladek and Anja.  That seems sad, but they do have an amazing legacy that they can read about in their father's book.

In all, I would really recommend this book for people who like graphic novels and history.  It's a wonderful read and totally worth reading.

The Survivor's Tale Continues

What I read: I have started reading the next book of Maus called Maus II: And Here My Troubles Began.  In the beginning of the book, Art is struggling to draw his wife Francoise.  He can't decide if she should be a mouse too, because she converted to be Jewish in order to marry Art, but she is originally from France.  Mala leaves Vladek which causes a crisis in Vladek's life.  He expects Art and Francoise to help take care of him for the rest of the summer.  Also in the first few chapters of this book, Art visits his psychiatrist, who is also a survivor of the Holocaust.  In these scenes, Art and everyone else are wearing animal masks.

Vladek finally tells Art about his first day at Auschwitz.  Vladek explains how he thought that he was going to immediately die in the gas chambers.  In reality, he took a shower in freezing cold water.  Soon after, Vladek gets an identification number tattooed on his arm.  This is the same number that we saw on his arm in the first book.  Vladek is number 175113.  Vladek also tells Art about an experience he had when he was about to give up all hope.  He says that a Polish priest told him that his number means good luck. The priest tells him, "Your number starts with 17.  In Hebrew that's 'K'minyan Tov.' Seventeen is a very good omen... It ends with 13, the age a Jewish boy becomes a man... and look!  Added together it totals 18.  That's 'chai,' the Hebrew number of life."

Vladek tells Art all about living in the bunkers at Auschwitz.  The Kapo would make them get out of their bunkers to do a lot of exercise in the middle of the night.  Whoever didn't move quickly would be beat with a club.  They were also starving and very weak. The one thing that helps Vladek is his knowledge of languages. One day the Kapo asks is anyone speaks Polish and English. Although neither was Vladek's first language, he spoke both.  This allowed him to teach the Kapo English and get a more favorable position with the Kapo.  He also sometimes had access to extra food and clothes. 

Approximately how happy Vladek felt when he got extra food

In the last chapter that I read Valdek and the other prisoners of Auschwitz are forced to leave the camp.  This is because the Germans knew that the Russians were coming and they had to flee. They burned all their tanks, guns, and everything.  Vladek got pushed into a train meant for cattle with a ton of other people. Most of them died on the train but Vladek survived by eating melted snow.  He ended up in another camp that had even worse conditions than Auschwitz.  There Vladek got typhus (the disease that killed Anne Frank) and almost died.  But once again, he was lucky to survive.

What I thought about: At the beginning of the second chapter, Art shows himself drawing his book on top of a pile of dead bodies.  It's a really creepy image. In this image it shows how Art feels that he's benefiting off the deaths of other people.  This is because his first book of Maus had already come out and sold millions of copies.  He became rich and famous because of his comic about the Holocaust.

In the same chapter there are a few pictures of people being gased and burned.  These images are really graphic and very scary to look at.  Although they are shown as mice, it's really clear that Art is showing actual people's deaths.  When I look at their mouths tuned up, they look really different from all the other pictures of mice in the book.  It seems like they are shown this way because this is the mice at a vulnerable point in their lives.

Another thing I thought about was how in parts of these chapters, Art hows himself and others wearing animal masks.  This is different from the Holocaust scenes where people are jsut shown as animals.  I thought a lot about what this maybe means.  It seems like Art is wearing a mouse mask because he knows he's Jewish but he doesn't feel Jewish enough because he didn't have to go through the same experiences his parents did.  So maybe he feels like he doesn't really deserve the label of "Jewish" like his parents earned it. 

Art with his mask on

What I conclude: As I read I keep on thinking about the horrors of the Holocaust.  I keep asking myself if this book would be stronger if the pictures were of people instead of animals.  I think it would actually be weaker.  There's something about showing everyone as an animal that makes it more bearable, but then easier to see the horrors instead of just feeling like we've seen this all before.  Sometimes people get so used to seeing horrrible pictures, like pictures of the Holocaust, and they stop reacting to them.  With the mice and other animals in this book, it still looks like something new that we have never seen before, so it's really strong.

Obviously Vladek will survive at the end of the book.  So will Anja. We know this because they are Art's parents and Art was born after the Holocaust.  However, it's hard to image how they will survive the incredibly difficult situations they have to deal with. It's really hard to think about how Anja will end up killing herself 23 years after the Holocaust ends.

A photo of Art and his mother Anja

Smuggled and Caught

What I read: The first chapter I read for this blog was about how Vladek, Anja, and Anja's whole family get sent into the ghetto. There, life is more difficult than it was before.  For example, Jews accused of stealing are hung in public for everyone to see.  It's horrifying.

Vladek and Anja decide to build secret bunkers for hiding in the ghetto and try not to get deported. They stay there for a while but the conditions are pretty rough.  Once the ghetto is completely empty, they go to a polish town pretending to be "Polish pigs" (in other words, not Jewish).  It works for a while but finally they decide they need to try to escape to Hungary.  When they try to escape, the smugglers call the Gestapo and Vladek and Anja get caught.  They get sent to Auschwitz concentration camp.

There was one more terrifying event that happens in this book before Valdek and Anja get sent to Auschwitz.  Their first son Richieu dies in a horrible way.  Anja's sister Tosha poisons Richieu, her own children, and herself. They are about to get caught by the Gestapo and sent away to a camp.  Tosha knows that they will all die there.  So instead of letting the Nazis control their deaths, she kills them all and herself.  When Valdek talks about this, its clear how much he loved his first son. 

Here the story switches to Vladek as an old man talking his adult son Art.  Vladek finds a comic that Art had made before called "Prisoner on the Hell Planet."  It's all about the death of Anja, Art's mother.  She slit her wrists and committed suicide.  Art was about 20 years old when this happened.  Art had to deal with this without getting a lot of support from Vladek.   This event was obviously really difficult for both of them


What I thought about: As I read the last chapters of Maus I I was thinking about different things that were related to the Holocaust.  One of these thoughts was the fact that the comic "Prisoner on the Hell Planet" has different images than Maus does.  In Maus the characters are portrayed as animals.  In "Prisoner on the Hell Planet" the characters are portrayed as humans.  The style of drawing is also very different.  Here is an example:

As you can see, these are people and not mice.  Also the whole work looks different.

Another thing that I thought about is how drawings can be stronger than words.  I especially thought about this when Vladek is more worried about Anja than himself when they are walking through the Polish streets pretending not to be Jewish.  Both Vladek and Anja are wearing pig masks in the drawing, but Anja's tail is showing. Vladek explains how Anja looks more stereotypically Jewish than he does.  He worries that someone might see Anja and figure out that she is Jewish from the way she looks.  But that worry is really shown in the drawing where she can't hide as well as he can.

The last thing I thought about was the movie Chicken Run.  I love that movie.  When I was a little girl I was really scared of it because I knew that it was actually about the Holocaust.  All of the images below are from the movie, but they look like actual pictures of Auschwitz.  The first shows the chicken coups from far away.  The second image is inside the bunks.  This picture looks a lot like pictures of prisoners in concentration camps.  The third shows chickens trying to escape.  The last picture is of the ovens that cook the chicken into pies, and it reminds me of the gas chambers and crematoriums.

What I conclude:  Now that I finished Maus I, it's clear to me that I will continue on to the second book.  I loved reading the first book and can't wait to start reading the second one.  The tale of how Vladek survives Auschwitz is something that I can't wait to find out about.  I also want to know more about Art and his relationship with his father.  I think I might find out more about his life at home with his wife too and that seems interesting.

Animals For People

What I read: For this blog post, I've started reading a new book. I'm really enjoying the graphic memoir Maus by Art Spiegelman. I've wanted to read this book for a long time because I had heard of it before and knew basically what it was about.

At the beginning, we see that instead of people, the characters are portrayed as animals.  For example, the Jews are shown as mice, the Germans are portrayed as cats, and the Poles are pigs.  The author Art and his family are mice in this book.  Art's father, Vladek, is a survivor of the Holocaust and the book is mostly the story that Vladek tells to Art about that period in his life.

Vladek's story begins before the start of World War II.  Vladek is a Polish Jew who lives in Sosnowiec in Poland.  Vladek tells his son Art how he met Art's mother, Anja, who is also Polish Jewish.  By the time Vladek tells this story to Art, Anja is already dead.

Vladek works all sorts of odd jobs, especially selling and trading goods.  Anja is from a much richer family than Vladek.  Still, Anja's family likes and accepts Vladek as a new member of their family.  For a while, Vladek and Anja are happy and doing well financially.  They marry and have a son called Richieu.  But things start to get hard.  After Anja has Richieu, she starts feels depressed and even suicidal.  Vladek tries to help her. 

At the same time, there are rumors about what's going on in Germany, especially with the German Jews living under Hitler. This is happening in the late 1930s.  In 1939, Hitler's army invades Poland and Vladek, who has already enlisted in Poland's military, gets called to the front to fight. Poland loses the battle quickly and Vladek is taken as a prisoner of war by the Germans.  There is one very intense moment during the battle when Vladek shoots and kills a cat (a German soldier).  While he is a prisoner of war, Vladek and the other Jews and treated much worse than the non-Jewish Polish POWs.

What I thought about:  When I started reading this book, I already understood the representation of animals. In the animal world cats chase mice.  This is just like the Germans in the book chasing the Jews.  Even though I haven't seen any Americans yet, I already know that the Americans will be represented as dogs because dogs chase cats.  Historically, we know that the Americans beat the Germans in two world wars, so it makes sense that they are shown as dogs. Also, we know that in Nazi Germany, Hitler talked about Jews as if they were rats. He even had anti-Jewish propaganda that portrayed Jews as rats. 

As I read, I realized that Vladek is a really interesting character to think about.  In the book, he tells his son Art about his story in a harsh way.  We also see Vladek being harsh with Art when Art is a little boy.  But when I found out a bit about Vladek's life, I felt like I understood why he's the way he is.  For example, in the picture below, Vladek is already an old man telling the story of his life to his son.  But we can see a glimpse of his left arm in the last frame. On his arm is a number tattoo from when he was in a camp.  This is a constant reminder of what Vladek went through and what he survived.  It's impossible for him to put those memories completely behind him.  His tattoo is a constant reminder of his past.

What I conclude: While there are two books in this series, it's the same story that continues from one to the other.  Therefore, I will be reading and blogging about both books as if they were one. It's all one story, but they were just published as two different books.

I'm really excited to read this book.  So far, it's met my expectations, which were very high.  For me, this book is hard yet interesting because I am Jewish.  Reading about the Holocaust can get me emotional sometimes but some books are worth it to read, and this is one of those.  The mixture of words and pictures make it look realistic despite the fact that the characters are animals instead of people.  I think I'm going to love this series.

Vladek as a mouse and Vladek as a man

The Love that IT Never Had

What I read: This week I finally finished reading A Wrinkle in Time.  Meg's father Mr. Murray tries to tesser away from IT.  He isn't so successful.  He does tesser away from IT, but he doesn't get to earth and Meg gets frozen by the Black Thing.

Suddenly Mr. Murray, Meg, and Calvin realize that they are on a planet inhabited by furry beasts with tentacles. Instead of attacking, the three beasts take Meg to cure her and help her get unfrozen.  One of these beasts becomes Aunt Beast.  She is the one who takes care of Meg while she recovers.  She does this even though she has no eyes and can't see Meg.





Fortunately the three Mrs. are on that same planet as Meg, Mr. Murray, and Calvin.  When they realize that Charles Wallace is not with them, they say that the only way to save him is for Meg to go back to Camazotz alone to rescue him from IT.  She goes back and rescues him by realizing that the only thing that she has that IT doesn't have is love.  She saves her brother with love.

At the end they all return home to Earth and reunite with the rest of their family.  to get home they wrinkle in time so that it doesn't seem like any time has passed to Meg's mother.

What I thought about:  While I was reading this book, I thought a lot about good and evil.  I thought about representations of evil, and this was especially true the week that I looked for images of evil online and came across the GIF from Fantasia's "A Night on Bald Mountain."  It's hard to think about how to represent evil in words and in pictures and I think that Madeleine L'Engle and Disney both did it well.

Another impotrant idea that I thought about was how important it is to be unique.  It's also equally important to accept your uniquness.  Meg has trouble doing this until the end of the book when she is happy to be different.  She has to go to Camazotz, though, to appreciate that it's okay to be different.  It can be hard to feel this way sometimes, but it's important to accept yourself for who you are and for all your differences.  

The last thing I thought about was the triumph of love.  In the end, Meg beats IT because she is human and is able to love.  That makes her more powerful than a super advanced brain like IT.  This is a theme that we can find in many books, movies, and stories.  I think that this one is well done and it made me like the book a lot.

What I conclude:  I liked how this book combined sci-fi and drama.  For example, tessering through time and space is one of the main sci-fi themes.  The dramatic parts are the emotional relationships between the characters.  I especially liked the relationship between Meg and Calvin because they are both dorky and intelligent.  They make a cute couple.

I recommend this book for people who like science fiction and would like to read a classic.  This book is considered a classic and has been read by many generations of children and adults since it was first published in 1963.  I also recommend this book for youngsters younger than me.  Although some of the ideas in it are complicated, they are easy to understand because the author does such a good job explaining it.

ITs Sameness

What I read: Calvin O'Keefe thinks he can handle things on his own.  He decides to go into a building called CENTRAL Central Intelligence Building, and he wants to go alone.  Meg and Charles Wallace don't agree and go with him.  Once inside, they find that every person inside is exactly the same.

There is one person who is different though, and that is the man with red eyes.  Meg tells the man that she and her brother want their father back.  As Meg tells him this, the man doesn't understand why they want their father to return home.  They eat a dinner, but all the food tastes like sand to Charles Wallace, who can't taste it unless he opens his mind to IT, which he won't do at this point.

But later, Charles Wallace seems to give in to IT.  IT has a rhythmic beating that is almost impossible to resist.  Meg tries really hard to think of other things, but IT is slowly starting to control her.  By the end of the chapter, Calvin says that they all need to tesser to escape IT and the entire building.

Meg sort of loses consciousness and when she wakes up again she can't move because she is frozen.  While Meg is frozen she hears Calvin and her father talking about how Mr. Murray ended up at Camazotz.  He explains that one of his colleagues tried to tesser from Earth to Mars.  But after he tried they couldn't tell if he was alive or not.  So Meg's father was the second to try to tesser and her ended up at Camazotz.

Meg tries to make a sound and let them know that she can hear them.  They finally realize that Meg can hear them and she starts asking where her brother Charles Wallace is.  When she finds out that they left him behind on Camazotz, she is really sad and angry about it.  Then Mr. Murray tells his daughter that "all things work together for good for them that love God" (190).


What I thought about:  I was really struck by the quote above and when I looked it up, I found out that it comes from the Holy Bible.  In the Bible, there is a quote from Romans that says, "All things work togther to those who love God."  This is interesting to me because this probably shows that Madeleine L'Engle was a religious woman.  Even if she wasn't really religious she at least knew a lot about the Bible, at least enough to put this in her own book.  This surprises me because it looks like Madeleine L'Engle is trying to put religious content in a book that is supposed to science fiction.  Most people think that science and religion have to be at opposite ends but this author seems to be into both, or at least she knows about both.  It makes me wonder how many other people are into both science and religion even though most people think they don't mix.

The other issue that I thought about a lot is how scary it would be to have something else controlling your mind.  It made me think about brain washing and how hard it would be to not be brain washed if someone was doing that to you.  

It made me think about the movie Star Wars when Anakin Skywalker gets brainwashed and turned into Darth Vader.  He turns to the dark side because of this, and it's a lot like Meg and Charles Wallace trying to resist IT, but having a hard time do it.

What I conclude: Reading these chapters I have to think about how hard it would be to face the problems that Meg and her family are facing.  If I was in this situation I might give up to IT and not be able to resist.  I think that this is what makes these characters unique in their own ways,

The other thing I realized is that no matter how tough you were, this situation would be so hard to deal with.  Meg is sure that she is right to go back for Charles Wallace, and it is hard to do the best for your loved ones but then also save yourself.  It seems like that's what Mr. Murray is doing in these chapters when he leaves his son behind.  Meg feels this is wrong but she isn't the one who gets to make the decision because she is still young.  When she talks to her father about it, he says that he is only human and that he makes mistakes too.

Wrinkling

What I read:
The three Mrs. take Meg, Calvin, and Charles Wallace to another planet called Uriel.  Once they arrive, Meg believes that they have traveled through another dimension.  The three Mrs. explain that they have wrinkled in time.  This is explained by using the drawing of the ant below.  In the book, there is the concept that if an ant walks on a string from one end to the other, it might take 10 seconds.  But if a person folds the string into two parts, the ant can now walk across in less than one second.  This is the 5th Dimension in the book.

We also find out about a mysterious black shadow that is fighting against the stars and planets, especially when stars die.  It turns out that Meg's father is being held behind the black shadow, which is described as pure evil.  Meg and Charles Wallace find out that they will have to fight the Black Thing to save their father and return home with him.



In the last chapter I read the children meet an upbeat woman called The Happy Medium.  She can show them the earth and what's happening there, but she doesn't want to look at something so melancholy.  The children wrinkle in time again and end up on a planet where Meg and Charles Wallace's father is supposed to be held.  There they have to separate from the three Mrs.  Each Mrs. gives each child a gift so that they can be successful in rescuing Mr. Murry.  They leave the three Mrs. and go into a really weird town where all everything is synchronized and no one seems like a real person.   


What I thought about:
The way that evil is being represented in this book is amazing.  Making dark things look evil and bad is always interesting to me.  It must be hard for authors to describe with words what evil would look like if we could see it, and I think that Madeleine L'Engle did an outstanding job of describing what evil is in this book.

The concept of having a 5th Dimension (tessering or wrinkling through time) is also really fascinating.  L'Engle describes this concept of science fiction with pictures, like the one of the ant shown above.  I think that this is extremely well done in the book because it's such a complicated theme but it's so easy to understand.  It's hard to describe this in words, but with the pictures it's all clear.  I love this idea of wrinkling through time in the 5th Dimension and wish that this were possible.

What I conclude:
At this point I'm about half way through the book.  I always liked science fiction and I'm not surprised that I'm really enjoying this book.  Probably talking about the dimensions is not my favorite science fiction theme, but this book is well written all the same.

At first I thought that the three Mrs. were witches because they seemed so magical.  But in these chapters that I read, we find out that Mrs. Whatsit was actually a star who gave up her star life to fight the Black Thing and saved much of the Milky Way galaxy by doing so.  This to me seems much cooler than being a witch.  Being a former star seems much more magical and strange.  I like the idea that now she can take a human form, but that's still a star.