10/26 Questions

• Vladek performed many odd jobs, such as a tinsmith and a shoemaker. He also participates in the mass lineups, as shown on page 32 and 58 of Maus II, where the guards line the Jews up to see who they keep and who they kill. As bad as it was, it wouldn't compare to Dachau. After being forced to march there, the Jews were crammed into what little space was left at Dachau, where disease spread so much more quickly, as evidenced by pages 94-97,when Vladek gets Typhus. Dachau was also a "death camp," as opposed to Auschwitz being a "Work Camp." They were sent there to die, not to work.
• It seems very similar in the overall scope of most survivor's stories that I've heard. The Jews were mistreated, then attacked, then forced into hiding, and then forced into the concentration camps, where they encountered nearly unspeakable horrors. But this is a story of a Jew who never seemed to truly resign and accept his fate. I was constantly in awe of Vladek and his resourcefulness. Also, the way the story is told is very unique, because of two reasons: It is a graphic novel, a medium made to show more than tell, and the choice to make each race of people a different animal.
• To think of the Jews as mice is a pretty good metaphor in terms of storytelling, even more so than having the Nazis being portrayed as cats. Mice are considered vermin, as well as being small and unimportant. People put mousetraps up in their house all the time. We see them as pests and much less than our dogs and cats, which are also mammals and not quite so different. If this is how Jews were more or less always perceived, and one thinks of the death camps as mouse traps, it makes the holocaust seem almost inevitable.
• I don't really consider books and other works about the Holocaust to be in the same boat as World War II, mostly because so much of the rest of the war is portrayed as a glorious, exciting thing, even now in modern media such as movies or video games. The Holocaust is and always has been seen as the polar opposite of this and is rarely connected to the war, with the exception of soldiers liberating the camps. Even in a lot of famous World War II movies rarely portray anything involving the Holocaust, while Holocaust works rarely mention what's going on outside of the camps. So no. I don't consider these books to really be about World War II. The events happened in the same time and place, but the two events rarely came together.
  As to whether the books were fiction, I don't think so. I read a book in the Good Books class a couple years ago called The Things They Carried, also about the horrors experienced in a warzone. The horrors and the terrors and the feelings were real, even if the stories are fabricated or some actual events changed with memory. It doesn't seem fictitious to me.