A real and horrifying look in the Holocaust and Auschwitz... A book that will haunt you. I feel this book should be read, so something so horrific never happens again, a reminder of the horrors done to innocent people.
Potent and filled with symbolism, the analogy of the Jews being mice, and the Germans as cats was horrifying in itself, and greatly fitting. ( )

This follow-up to the original "Maus" was also exceptional. It's fascinating how hand-drawn 'comic-book' illustrations and associated dialogue and text can present such an engaging reading experience. ( )

Based on the life of Art Spiegelman's father who was a concentration camp survivor. Art Spiegelman depicts himself interviewing his father from a period of 1980 to 1991. All that his father tells him about life as a Jew in the concentration camps, life after the ordeal, and even his father's current mental state (until his death) is depicted in the book.

What strikes you first about Maus is the cover. You wonder, why "Maus"? You open the book and you see the significance of the word. Spiegelman uses his artistic license to depict all the humans in his story as anthropomorphs. All the Jews (such as Spiegelman) are depicted as mice (maus = mouse in German), the Germans fittingly are drawn as cats. Poles are pigs, Americans are dogs. So there is never any confusion in your head about what which citizen you are seeing. The story brilliantly moves between two time-frames, the present and the WW II time. The horrors are almost faithfully depicted. In fact, there is one panel shown where a German soldier is shown throwing a Jewish child against a wall to stop its crying, and I can't get that image out of my head. Spiegelman also shows many of the negative traits of his father, and wonders in one of the panels if he wasn't stereotyping Jews by showing his father to be a stingy opportunist. You can feel his inner conflicts as he tried to show his father's life without being demeaning.

Maus was initially published in two parts, but a combined version of the two books is available as "The Complete Maus". I liked Maus I much better than Maus II, but both are excellent. In 1992, it became the first graphic novel to win a Pulitzer Prize (special citation). If you read it, you'll know that it was a deserved win.

Rating for Maus II: 4/5


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Summary: Volume 2 of a graphic novel on surviving Auschwitz, the story of Art Spiegelman’s parents and his struggle to care for his father.

At the end of Maus I Vladek and Anja Spiegelman arrive at the gates of Auschwitz. Maus II tells the story of their survival. It came down to currying the favor of one’s captors. Vladek gets preference for teaching a Polish guard English. He works as a tinsmith and a shoemaker, and is able to smuggle food to Anja. It comes down to a game of calories in a regime of slow starvation. The weak or sick are “selected” and sent to the ovens.

Vladek sees the ovens, which are described and rendered. His detail tears them down for transport to Germany as the Russians approach. He describes the terrible conditions of the transports, stuffed into cars, left on sidings for starvation and typhus to take them. Vladek and Anja are separated, liberated, eventually reunited and they find their way to America. Art is born. As we learned in the first volume, Anja took her life in 1968, never free of the Holocaust nightmares.

Things have worsened for Vladek. At the beginning of the Maus II, Mala, Vladek’s second wife leaves him for Florida. Alone at his summer bungalow and in fragile health, he calls Art and Francoise for help. They come for a weekend and he tries to talk them into staying for the summer. They encounter the fussiness that drove Mala crazy. And his neighbors, who tried to help, expect the young couple to step in. Later, Vladek goes to Florida and he and Mala re-unite. Then his heart condition worsens and Art brings him back to New York, where he eventually dies.

But Vladek’s death isn’t the end of suffering. Because Vladek had inflicted his pain, the struggle against survivor’s guilt, on Art, Art could never live up to his expectations. Now a success, he feels bad to prove his father wrong. Through recounting the conversations with his psychiatrist, also a survivor, Spiegelman portrays the intergenerational trauma Holocaust families experienced.

Through the graphic format, we experience the prisoners struggle to survive. While their bodies weaken, they hope for liberation–that they will live just long enough. Meanwhile, friends go to the ovens. And the pall and the smell hangs over them. In the re-telling, we witness a father and son trying to make sense of their shared pain to each other. Through rendering this story, Spiegelman bears witness graphically to the horrors of the Holocaust, the resilient courage of the survivors, and their enduring pain and sadness. ( )

This is the second book that Art Spiegelman wrote. It follows the story of the first one where Art's father, Vladek, recounts his experience in the holocaust. The second book goes through more of how Vladek survived in Auschwitz. The story also builds on Art's relationship with his father and relating a lot of the things he does to surviving the holocaust. I would use this book in a high school classroom because it has more language and more mature themes than the first book. (135 pages).