Since the McMinn County Board of Education unanimously agreed to pull “Maus” from its eighth-grade curriculum, I had to check out a copy from the library.
“Maus” was written by comic artist Art Spiegelman and published in 1986, and it received the Pulitzer Prize in 1992. It focuses on Art’s father Vladek and his family, including his wife Anja (Art’s mother). It starts in the mid-1930s and includes the couple’s early years, their internment in the Auschwitz concentration and death camp, and reunification after the war ended.
The story includes powerful, vivid descriptions of how Jews were treated by the Nazis and their collaborators; the fear, deprivation, brutality, terror, and death the Jewish people felt and experienced; and the occasional tale of survival and reunification.
I thought it was incredibly powerful, and it is a story that clearly should be shared. I think this might be the first account I have read from someone who survived one of Nazi Germany’s concentration and death camps in Poland and Germany.
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