Maus I Chapter 1-3

Maus I Chapters 1-3

Maus Chapter One starts off with Artie visiting his father, Vladek, and his new wife, Mala in Rego Park. Artie finds out immediately that Mala and Vladek do not get along very well. Artie tells his father that he wants to draw a comic book about his father’s experience while he was in the war. Vladek is reluctant at first but then dives in the story saying that in his youth he was a very attractive man and that girls chased him all the time. One girl in particular though, Lucia, stuck around him a lot, something that Vladek was not too happy about. One day he meets his cousin coming off a train who tells him that she wants to introduce him to a new girl, Anja, the girl that Vladek would eventually marry. It seems that Vladek immediately falls in love with Anja because he describes that they spent much time together and that she sent him letters written in beautiful Polish. All of this was much to Lucia’s disappointment and she tries to sabotage the eventual marriage by sending Anja a letter saying how bad of a reputation that Vladek has. This has no success as Vladek and Anja eventually get married. It was after they were married that the anti-Semitic relations with the Nazi’s began to get worse. Anja is responsible for conspiring with her communist friend, and the police find out and arrest the seamstress, the person who Anja hides the package with. All appears to be going well as Vladek opens a textile factory with the help of his father-in-law and Anja gives birth to their first son, Richieu. But then Anja becomes very depressed and Vladek and Anja are forced to move to a sanitarium for three months until Anja gets better. Upon their return, Vladek finds out how much worse the relations with the Nazis have gotten while he was away. A year later Vladek finds out that he is drafted by the Polish army because he is currently in the Polish reserves. It is not much longer that Vladek is marching away to fight the Germans and Anja is fleeing to Sosnowiec. The story then continues as Vladek says that after a few days of basic training he is on the frontier against the Germans. Artie is surprised that it only took a few days but then Vladek explains that he was in the army for a year and a half when he was 21 and went to training every four years so not much extra training was required for him. Vladek then describes how is in a trench war fighting the Germans and he is ordered by his commander to start shooting. Vladek shoots at what appears to be a moving tree but, as Vladek later finds out, is a Nazi soldier. Vladek is soon captured by the Nazis and is taken to a Prisoner of War camp where he soon finds out that the Jews there are segregated by being given extra work and are forced to live in cold tents while the rest of the prisoners get to live in cabins. Over a month later, Vladek and his friends volunteer to be transferred to a new site where they are forced to do hard work but also receive warm beds in return. It is here that Vladek has a vision of his grandfather telling him that on the day of Parshas Truma, a specific Jewish reading, that he will be freed. Sure enough on that day, which turns out to be a very special day for Vladek for other reasons, they are released but sent to another prison camp. However, with the help of some officials, Vladek is able to escape the prison and eventually reach his parents. Then, disguised as a Pole, Vladek eventually makes it back home to his wife and child. It is here that Vladek finishes his story for a time.

I think that these three chapters do a great job of telling what life was like for an average Jew leading up to the Holocaust. It gives them a human personality that people seldom associate with some of the victims and survivors of that time. This is what I like most of all in reading Maus. I especially like how Art Spiegelman manifests the relationship with Artie and his father, Vladek. As of right now, it is rather evident that the effects of what happened during the war and the Holocaust have taken their toll on poor old Vladek. He is rather irritable, constantly bickering and blaming others for faults that he clearly causes, like when he spills his pills and blames it on Artie. These three chapters set up a relationship between Artie and his father that I know I will enjoy reading more about in the chapters to come.