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.