This poem seems like a transition from thoughts of a little girl during the Holocaust to the same girl as a survivor after the war is over. The poem starts off with the girl telling the reader that she went through lots of death and guilt. She feels like she was partly responsible for these deaths as she says: “I’m a canal in Europe where bodies are floating… I’m a mass grave”. Without a doubt, the similes she uses are very descriptive and really make you feel death and mourning during the war and how it felt to witness it all. The poem seems to be this girl’s memories transitioning from the concentration camps to escaping them to ending up mourning in Israel.She describes herself and other women in the streets of Israel depressed and all wearing black.  It’s a sad thought that the people who actually survived the Holocaust didn’t live happily ever after; they continued to mourn and suffer even after the war was over.

It may not be so obvious in the storytelling, but Vladek and his family’s lives before and during the Holocaust were full of fear. Who wouldn’t be scared for their lives working under the radar with the threat of being killed. Who wouldn’t be frightened having to see people the community being hanged in public for a week? Vladek continued dealing in the black market even after his father-in-law’s friends were hanged for doing the same thing. Vladek and his family first thought to hide their grandparents when the Germans came searching for the elderly. But, out of fear of being punished, they ended up sending their grandparents with the Germans. Vladek had to decide weather to go to the Stadium to be registered when the Jews were called. All these decisions involved lots of fear throughout the thought process. Imagine, during the Holocaust,  what other people had going through minds when they saw mass murder every day. They needed to decide whether to steal food, escape the camp  or sometimes even to jump on the barbed wire out of fear.

3. Does this form effectively tell a Holocaust story? How does it differ from a conventional Holocaust story?

Maus is a well written and great way to educate people about the Holocaust. Art’s father’s story is told in a very weird and unique way for a Holocaust story to be told. I am used to going to the community hall on Holocaust Remembrance Day and listening to an old man/lady tell her eye-witness story of the pain she went through in the Holocaust. Without a doubt this is one of the most effective ways of telling on the history- from the mind and mouth of an eye witness. But, the way this Holocaust story is told in Maus, the way we learn about Vladek’s story and journey through the Holocaust , is not the same as hearing it from a survivor on remembrance day. There is a feel of traveling back in time and learning this man’s story from Maus and it’s done in an interesting way that’ll attract new readers and keep readers engaged in the story. Telling the story of the Holocaust through a comic book may not be the same as hearing a survivor speak his/her mind, but it sure is an interesting and effective way of getting the story and the emotion behind it across.