Impact of Maus

Alright so the part Maus that is very prominent in my memory is just the inhumanity of the Nazis in a bunch of different situations. First when there was a child crying in one of the lines to wait to do something for the Germans, one of the Nazi picked up the kid and whacked him/her against a stone wall. This is hard for me to imagine that someone could be so violent as to do this, but I think that thing that makes it so vivid in my mind was the way that Art Spiegelman drew this part, with a big puddle of blood on the wall where the Nazi his this child against it. This nonchalant killing of children reminds me of a book I read in 8th grade for my German class, Night by Elie Wiesel. Wiesel is a Holocaust survivor who tells his story about living through Nazi Germany in concentration camps. One of the parts of the book that links with the part from Maus is that Nazi soldiers would take infants and new born babies away from their mothers, wrap them in blankets and then throw them up in the air and use them as target practice. Again, this is something that it’s very hard for me to believe that any human-being could be capable of this horrific crime. However, the whole Holocaust was filled with stories like this so I guess it’s not as hard to believe as it once was.


Another part of Maus that makes me think how horrible the Nazis were, was the ending part of the story when the remaining Jews from Auschwitz and other concentration camps were put on trains for days without food, drink, or being able to sit down in some cases. The Nazis would simple open the train door and tell them to get rid of the dead people and to clean up their waste to simply close the door again and to go for another few days. This treatment of the Jews as animals is absolutely horrifying.


When Spiegelman was discussing and drawing out the map of what the crematorians looked like in Auschwitz I realized that it’s hard to imagine the actual building that had this purpose, and just how much more impacting it is when you see these buildings in person. Two summers ago, with the field hockey team here at QU, I went to Germany, Austria and Italy. We played games at a bunch of different venues and sight-seed (is that a word?) at the same time. One of the places that we went was the concentration camp at Dachau. As I said before I took German in 8th grade and for three years in high school so I knew the main idea and the things that happened there so I was a bit prepared for what I was about to experience. However, nothing could have prepared me for going into the actual building where the crematorium was. In some of the rooms there were signs saying what the particular room was used for, and I’m pretty sure there were pictures of the rooms when in one case an entire room was full of dead bodies that had just gone through the gas-chamber. Seeing the ovens, and walking into the small-quartered gas chamber sent shivers down my spine when I was there, and now thinking about it, it makes me sick to my stomach. How can any human being think up ways of executing others they way that the Nazis did? I have absolutely no idea.