Week Seven; Maus

This one was a bit hard to read in all honesty. Let me just start by saying, I never fully understood the weight that could be created through comics. So reading Blankets, A Contract with God, and now Maus, has been a real heavy eye opener. This one hits very close to home through family and people I care about. This comic dealt not only with the holocuast, which is in instead, a stupid heavy subject, but it also dealt with the mental health of most of the people who came out of the concentration camps. From leaving the gas on in the stove because the cost is included in the rent, to compulsively straightening everything anyone touches because it’s so important to have some sort of control, the mental pain of the people who survived was suffocating. What is amazing is the mental stress that was passed on to his son as well. Someone who never even was close to the events, walks away from his fathers narrative unable to comprehend or mentally handle the event. Can you even imagine how heavy it would weigh on you if you’d actually been there? Cleaning out the ovens, see the mass graves. This comic does a fantastic job of setting up the characters helping you understand the relationships. You see some in memories as younger more ideal, selves as are usually the case in memories. You see a world and hear stories you knew existed but are confronted and challenged to think about a lot of aspects that make it even more real. Picture the gas chambers, imagine the smell of burning human fats and flesh, hear the screams, such sensory aspects that turn stories into a very harsh reality. The one thing that made this very brutal telling more bareable was the use of animals instead of human imagery. As terrible as it sounds, it’s because of this that you are able to almost tell yourself that they aren’t human, because you see a mouse, or a pig, or a dog, or cat. You know this to be a horrid lie, something you do to make yourself feel better about the whole situation but you also know it’s not something you can really hide behind. Those. Weren’t mice, or pigs, or dogs, but actually people. A sick reality. Something we can’t escape, and something, like this comic was so clear in showing us, we can never, fully, comprehend the horrors. It’s history, all we can do it’s try to understand, and try to make sure it doesn’t happen again. What else can we do?