One thing the book especially focuses on is awe at the lengths humans will go to survive. One particularly touching and astonishing sequence is when the author's father (the book is actually a memoir of the author/artist's father's true story) is separated from his wife and sacrifices everything to find her again.
"I traded my things to have gifts," his father says. "...We went, sometimes by foot, sometimes by train. One place we stopped, hours, hours, and hours...I couldn't find my friend and my luggage. I had only my thin shirt and my water. Shivek went back to Hannover to find me again...But I went only straight to Poland. It took 3 to 4 weeks."
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| A page from Art Spiegelman's Maus |
The author is in awe of his father's resilience and the lengths he went to in such terrible conditions to be reunited with his mother. There is a kind of reverence expressed but yet not quite expressed throughout the work, and especially at this part as the acts of courage and love go beyond the author's ability to truly appreciate, and he knows it. The awe effect is enhanced by the fact that these are personal stories told face to face from father to son--an idea that relates to +Greg Bayles's project. In a way, the whole work is the recognition that Spiegelman's father's experiences are greater than he'll ever really understand and no medium can really capture them, and so in recognition of that he chooses to at least do something to try and honor his father, and so he does what he can, he writes and illustrates a graphic novel about it. People might react with shock and awe at the audacity of depicting such a tragedy in a medium associated with superheroes and cartoons, but part of the message of the work is that experiences like these are so awesome that no artistic medium can do them full justice. But any quality artistic representation makes it memorable, and that's what matters: remembering that humans are capable of all that the Holocaust was--on both sides.
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