Read ‘Maus’ for International Holocaust Rememberance Day
I know what I’m re-reading today. And if you haven’t read Maus: A Survivor’s Tale yet yourself, you should. Comics really don’t get much better.
Consider it a rebuttal to all the people who insist that the Holocaust never happened, and that it’s a shame that it didn’t.
The book is amazing and a demonstration of what can be done in graphic novel format. Very deserving of every award and praise it received when first published.
Someone I’ve always admired is the late, legendary Sam Fuller, who may have embellished the truth sometimes, but never lied about what he saw. He was with the First Infantry when they liberated Falkenau, and he filmed the carnage. Needless to say, even without seeing the footage from Buchenwald and other camps, I’d have believed the Holocaust happened just on his word. The idea that anyone could deny such a revolting chapter in human history, wholesale murder of Jews, Catholics, gays, Gypsies, anybody that wasn’t the Aryan ideal… it makes me nauseous, which right now, with me fighting the flu, is really bad. Oh yeah, I’m gonna re-read Maus.
Maus is notable in my family as the one comic that my mother read and had high praise for. (Don’t recall how that came to be, but it did.) (She was accustomed to working with people who were of first generation Polish heritage, so some of that was familiar to her.)