Maus: Father And Son Relationship In The Holocaust

Although there has been other genocides, the Holocaust has been the worst event that took place in history. Two million Jews and other minorities were targeted and killed. The Holocaust was successful in carrying out all the atrocities they did under the regime of Hitler, because Hitler and his followers were organize and tactical when caring out their reign of terror. Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic memoir, Maus, written by Art Speigelman’s (1991). The author writes about his father experience in the concentration camp. When reading the novel the readers can read that Art and his father, Vladex, don’t have a healthy relationship. There are times in the novel that the reader can feel Art resentment towards his father and dead brother who …show more content…
... it 's spooky having sibling rivalry with a snapshot!” (Spiegelman,1991, p. 15). Here one can infer that when Art was a child, he was troubled by the fact that his parents idolize his dead brother. When comparing Art and father relationship to other Holocaust survivor’s father and son relationship one can see that they don’t have a normal father and son relationship. The traumatic experiences that they went through in the concentration camps has compromises the way normal parents act toward their offspring. Also in Maus volume one the author lets the readers know that in the past, he was in a mental institution, this may have been because of his childhood. The psychological effect the Holocaust had on the survivor children such as, mental disorders, traumas, stress, anxiety social anxiety and anti-social. The psychological effect on these children are passed from one generation to the next till one person decides to seek help. Survivor parents most of the time do not know that when they talk about their experience during the Holocaust it can scar a child, especially since at a young age children minds are so …show more content…
My father heard the noise, saw the flies and mosquitoes get zapped and very quietly said, That 's how Hitler did it, too. There was no escaping his past.” (Levy, S. P. 2008.para.1)”.
This is one way the children were affected psychologically from their parents experience and the children were able to tell that their parents would have flashback to the days of the Holocaust. Although the children of Holocaust survivors did suffer psychological effects because of the parents. Research shows that the children were able to sympathize better than the average person an example is: “On the Narcissistic Personality Dimension, the present sample showed less narcissism than the standardization sample. This difference may be due to the fact that our present sample was probably concerned with the trauma that their parents and their families faced during the Nazi period (as suggested by their volunteering for the study). They were able to recognize and experience how others feel to a greater extent, that is, were less narcissistic, than the average individual.” (Baron & Reznkoff ,