Since the last piece regarding the graphic novel “Maus”, I completed my reading and it was beyond amazing!

Throughout the book, we learn of Art Spiegelman’s father, how he survived the holocaust, and how it affected his life later on. Unfortunately, Spiegelman’s mother committed suicide when he was a child, and Mr. Spiegelman (Art’s Father) never moved on (who could blame him)?

Throughout his father’s life, his father dealt with the post-traumatic stress from the Holocaust. Mr. Spiegelman refused to waste his money and would ration food and even keep old boxes with little to nothing left in them in case something happened.

Though he later remarried, Anya and Mr. Spiegelman were soulmates, and even when in different camps, they still made it out of the Holocaust together. Living through this tragedy had an everlasting effect on his parents, and it directly affected Art.

To reiterate what I said in the last article, the Holocaust killed millions of innocent people. This book is very important because Spiegelman’s parents survived the Holocaust, but people are worried about the nudity and cursing in the book.

The cursing and nudity are nowhere near the worst things that happened within the genocide. The curses are few and the ´nudity´ are lumps found in various spots on the mice. It’s not at all vulgar, and the nudity depicts how starved the prisoners of the Holocaust were.

I have family that escaped concentration camps, so I’ve known about the Holocaust since I was young enough to learn the less gruesome details, but some people had no clue what it was until high school, or never learned about it at all.

This is such an issue for many reasons, but I can narrow it down to three:

1) History repeats itself. If we don’t learn, we can’t change as a society. If all of these horrible things never happened, we wouldn’t be at the point where we are today.
2) There are people who are “Holocaust-deniers.” They seriously doubt that it happened. Tying back to the first point, if you deny something happened, you will find yourself being anti-semitic.
3) Nazism is still an issue, hence Neo-Nazis being a sadly large group. These people usually believe in the Holocaust, and see it as a good thing. It’s absolutely vile.

I’m going to end this with a question for the schools who have banned this book: Would you rather have students that deny the Holocaust existed and are inherently anti-semitic, or have students that know what happened, even if that means they’ll see naked mice and a few curse words?