Interpreting The Holocaust In Maus By Art Spiegelman

Depicting a time in history that no one wants to remember is a very difficult task. It is, however, necessary to properly depict the Holocaust in order to ensure people will remember the horrors that occurred. One of the biggest difficulties faced is attempting to represent the holocaust without romanticizing it. While this is not an issue with museums or memorials, when it comes to writing about the Holocaust this can make it very difficult to create a good and complete story without making up a little bit of it along the way. It is, however, important to ensure the Holocaust isn’t romanticized as that would create a story focused on entertainment instead of memorialization and remembrance.
Although compiling survivors’ testimonies into mediums such as films and books is not an easy undertaking, it has been achieved. The son of two Holocaust survivors, Art Spiegelman, a cartoonist, used comic books to carry on the legacy of his father before, during, and after the Holocaust. He extensively interviewed his father, who survived the Holocaust, and created Maus, a series of graphic novels depicting his parents’ struggles before and after the war, which would soon become two of the most popular depictions of the Holocaust ever made. …show more content…
Spiegelman does this by using animals to represent people with the Jews are represented as mice, the Germans as cats, the Polish as pigs, the Americans as dogs, and the French as frogs. It is with this that Spiegelman is able to paint a vivid depiction of the horrors faced by survivors of the Holocaust which everyone can easily understand. However, he also includes actual photographs of his mother, father, and dead brother, Richieu, within the graphic novel in order to give his characters faces and help to make the story more