learntoquestion ltq discussions

Questions to Consider:

LTQ Post Option 1:

1. Is Spiegelman’s use of the comic form effective in conveying the emotional and historical weight of the Holocaust? How does the format of the graphic novel support movement between past and present, and integration of the two, as Vladek tells his story? What is the argument against the suggestion that the medium lacks the seriousness needed to discuss the Holocaust?

LTQ Post Option 2:

2. How does generational trauma impact the children of Holocaust survivors, like Spiegelman? How does the weight of the trauma experienced by direct ancestors as well as communities as a whole play into the lives of young people today? Is it possible to move beyond generational trauma, or is it better to live with and acknowledge it? (Please note you can also discuss generational trauma from other wars, conflicts or genocides in addition to what you notice in Maus).

Word Count Requirement: 500-750 words

Sources to Reference:

Please refer to the ideas, either using a description, quote or paraphrasing, from Maus I or II in addition to one other source in your response.

Maus I (Spiegelman,1986)

Maus II (Spiegelman,1991)

“The Shadow of Past Time”: History and Graphic Representation in Maus (Chute, 2006)

Intergenerational transmission of trauma in Spiegelman's Maus (Stanislav, 2013)

The Holocaust shaped a large portion of survivors’ character and lives, and was a period marked by loss, suffering, and hardship. To many in the years that followed, such a calamity is unimaginable. The entire scope of survivors’ history and emotions and their effect on one’s identity cannot be fully understood without firsthand experience, creating a divide between generations that is reinforced by trauma. Survivors of the Holocaust carry trauma that impact their children through postmemory, or the experiences that are separated by distance and the degree of personal connection. Kolar Stanislav in Intergenerational Transmission of Trauma in Spiegelman’s ‘Maus’ notes, “Postmemory characterizes the experience of those who grow up dominated by narratives that preceded their birth, whose own belated stories are evacuated by the stories of the previous generation, shaped by traumatic events that can be neither understood nor recreated.” This causes feelings of displacement, estrangement, and a lack of experience, leading to identity crisis. This is evident in Maus, as Artie feels distanced from what Vladek had endured, clawing at scraps of stories in attempts to gain insight into the past. Artie and Vladek’s relationship is tense, and Artie maintains a tense, unempathetic, and impatient temperament towards his father, particularly because generational trauma of Holocaust survivors often causes children to feel disconnected from their family’s history and their parents, because they are incapable of truly relating on an intimate level. On page 16 of Maus II, Artie says, “I know this is insane, but somehow I wish I had been in Auschwitz with my parents so I know what they really went through. I guess it’s some kind of guilt about having an easier life than they did. I feel so inadequate trying to reconstruct a reality that was worse than my darkest dreams…There’s so much I’ll never be able to understand or visualize.” Moreover, trauma often influences the characteristics, behavior, and beliefs of survivors, which sticks with them long after their hardship has ended and impacts the next generation. During the Holocaust, Vladek was forced to drastically ration his savings and survive from odd jobs, lost many luxuries of the pre-war era, and could not afford many necessities at times. As a result, he became extremely cheap and unwilling to waste money or resources. He cares excessively about money, and making sure materials are used completely. This has taken a toll on the people around him, especially Mala, who he constantly accuses of trying to steal his assets from him, and Artie, who feels mortified at his father’s habits. Moreover, due to the terrible living conditions inside the Nazi concencration camps and Jewish ghettos, when the prisoners were purposefully starved, Vladek became very cautious about not wasting food. When Artie was younger, for instance, Vladek forced him to eat everything on his plate, and would often argue with him or leave leftovers until Artie consumed it out of starvation. This shows how suffering incurred by the Holocaust and other traumatic events can leave a lasting impact on people, also directly or indirectly affecting their children.

It is an incredible feat to move on from generational trauma, because of how it seems to repeat across time even when it is not purposefully done. It’s often difficult to recognize and break patterns of trauma, and often it stems from what a family has gone through in certain eras of history. Although it is a shadow that plagues a family, it is part of their experiences, and an explanation for how families change over time. It is not sufficient to completely disregard generational trauma and move on from it, because of this importance in distinguishing a family’s past. Rather it’s better to accept a family’s experiences, understand their stories, and learn to reverse harmful behaviors. Artie will likely never be able to change Vladek, but he still has the opportunity to come to an understanding with his father, and with himself and his own identity, rather than continuing to display his dissatisfaction with those around him.

Generational Trauma is a big theme in the book Maus that is exhibited by Spiegleman in the form of guilt. Throughout the comic, Art feels an increasing amount of guilt for his relationship with his parents and his failure to understand their experiences. On page 175 of Maus, Vladek begins to tell Art the story of his brother Richieu and his death. Richieu died during the war and Art feels as though he is always in comparison to him, he feels unworthy of his parents' love and that he is living in his brother’s shadow. Art tells us that his parents had a photograph of Richieu hanging on their bedroom wall. This photograph symbolizes Art’s guilt that he can't understand his parents' experiences during the Holocaust. In the article “Intergenerational transmission of trauma in Spiegelman’s Maus”, Sicher argues that “Richieu is the absent presence in the home that makes Art feel guilty and inferior” (2005: 148). Though Art is aware of the absurdity of the rivalry with his dead brother, he is unable to overcome his feelings of inferiority. As a “replacement child” he fills a void, an empty space left after Richieu's violent death and like the other inter-generational and trans-generational recipients of the trauma of the Holocaust, he faces the problem of confusion about his identity”. Art is the annoying son who always got in trouble, this comparison isn’t fair to Art because in his parents mind, Richieu is still an innocent child who never grew up. This trauma his parents experienced regarding the death of his brother is passed down to Art, making him feel constantly inferior and disconnected from his parents.

Generational trauma impacts children of Holocaust survivors in many ways, for Art, it results in anxiety, guilt, and difficulty forming a healthy relationship with his father. Art’s responsibility to bear witness to his parent’s suffering while not experiencing trauma first-hand exacerbates these feelings of guilt and confusion. It also complicates his ability to connect with his father on an emotional level. I think that in some cases it is important for communities to acknowledge generational trauma instead of suppressing it. Acknowledging these shared histories of suffering and guilt can help people better understand each other and create stronger bonds. In Maus, If Art and Vladek were able to be more open and share their feelings regarding the Holocaust then they might have been able to build a better relationship. Art might not have felt as guilty about his mother’s death or as annoyed with his father for throwing away her diaries. By confronting the trauma together they might have found some form of healing. But, by suppressing and avoiding their trauma they are creating an ongoing cycle of pain which is more harmful than helpful. It might be possible to move beyond generational trauma but I think an important step to do that is by acknowledging it and being emotionally open. Without recognizing the trauma, it could be passed down through generations indefinitely which prevents many generations from fully healing. Instead of living with trauma in silence it is better to face it and work to find a collective sense of healing with those who have also experienced similar situations.

Generational trauma has heavily impacted the lives of Holocaust survivors as the stress and experiences can be passed down mentally and biologically. In the case of Art Spiegelman, Art has grown up his entire life knowing and fearing how dark humanity can get. Most children do not grow up knowing the atrocities of genocide and mass murder which helps their brains develop healthily. However, Art has grown up impacted by the trauma of his family despite the fact he did not experience the trauma directly. This is seen when Art speaks about his nightmares where he is dragged away by SS soldiers on page 16 of Maus II. The fact that Art has nightmares about experiences he has not lived through shows how deeply the experiences of family members can penetrate the subconscious. Parents play a big role in how children see themselves and the rest of the world around them. This darkness that Art has watched both of his parents deal with has made him feel both great guilt and disappointment as he will never truly understand the weight of the Holocaust, but he will never truly know the world without it. In his work “Intergenerational transmission of trauma in Spiegelman's Maus”, Kolář Stanislav writes that “In revisiting this trauma while writing the comic book, Art’s sense of guilt is only aggravated further, because he is aware of the fact that he has failed to meet his parents’ expectations and has become a source of disappointment for them. What is more, he becomes aware of the lack of empathy he demonstrated towards his mother, and he feels that his failure to understand her contributed to her sense of loneliness”( Stanislav 229). Stanislav analyzes how Art’s familial role is affected by the Holocaust. In addition to Stanislav’s analysis, I think it is important to explore how Richieu can be seen as a symbol of the effect of the Holocaust on Art. In the story, Art says that Richieu is a ghost figure in his family that he has never met. Art only knows how the loss of Richieu has affected his family, and how it affects his familial role. This is similar to the experiences Art has had with the Holocaust, as Art has never lived through the Holocaust but he has grown up with it like a ghost in his house. Art watches how Richieu and the Holocaust have affected the way his parents view life and their relationship with him. All the experiences that Art has accumulated through his family make him feel as if he is also living through the effects of the Holocaust.

I do not think that generational trauma is something that people should try and move on from. Although it may be difficult to handle, it is essential for the recovery and survival of history. In Maus, Art tries to get his father to “move on” by acknowledging what happened rather than suppressing it. All experiences, good and bad, are important and should be acknowledged. By trying to forget things such as the Holocaust, we allow those who perpetuated it, the Nazi party, to win. In experiences other than Arts, the impact of history is present in the lives of young people today. The people originally affected by events such as the Holocaust may not all be around to warn younger generations about how these events can start. However, the children and grandchildren of these survivors live and breathe to stop events like these from happening again.

Generational trauma leaves the children of the holocaust with a feeling of guilt along with separation from their parents as they will not be able to comprehend the extent of what their parents had gone through. In the case of Vladek and Artie there is an evident divide between the two given their disagreements between one another. The experience Vladek had with the Holocaust had affected Art, shaping who he is as a person, the dynamic between his father, along with his understanding of survival. Vladek's own trauma from the Holocaust impacts his behavior resulting in his constant paranoia and cold nature. This leaves Vladek to be very skeptical creating this previously mentioned.Art is unable to comprehend his father's short temper but feels the severity of Vladek's expectations for him. Additionally arts generational trauma is evident in his strong feelings of guilt as “Art’s sense of guilt is only aggravated further, because he is aware of the fact that he has failed to meet his parents’ expectations and has become a source of disappointment for them” ( Stanislav, 2013).Art has to balance capturing the essence of his fathers story while also balancing his own burdens. With the loss of his mother his feelings of displacement are heightened. He shows feelings of guilt when he compares himself to the victims of the Holocaust explaining that he feels guilty that he has lived a safe and comfortable life compared to the struggles of his parentions. Thus highlighting that generational trauma can be direct actions or even made internally. Outside of the Spigelmans book , generational trauma affects many children of survivor from atrocities as it is common to have guilt and commonly ptsd as a child. I think it's possible to have a combination of both moving on and acknowledgement. To elaborate, I think it's important to understand and comprehend what has occurred. Like in the case of art listening to vladek's story. It may be hard to move beyond generational trauma since the events that occurred can not be changed.

1. Is Spiegelman’s use of the comic form effective in conveying the emotional and historical weight of the Holocaust? How does the format of the graphic novel support movement between past and present, and integration of the two, as Vladek tells his story? What is the argument against the suggestion that the medium lacks the seriousness needed to discuss the Holocaust?

Generational trauma, as shown in Maus by Art Spiegelman, demonstrates how the psychological and emotional wounds of Holocaust survivors continue to be present through the next generations. In terms of Spiegelman, his father Vladek, survived devastating horrors during World War II, and the trauma of these experiences significantly shaped his life and relationship with his son. Art’s struggle to understand his father’s behavior and to connect with him is an example of how the generations following survivors see not only the stories of trauma but also the emotional weight that they carry. The survivors of stuff like this will carry a mix of guilt, shame, anger, and fear, which gets passed on to the following generations, even though they did not experience the trauma directly. In Maus, Art describes how he feels burdened by the weight of his father’s history and how he struggles to understand a past that he did not live through, yet it still affects his everyday life. This is also known as “post-memory,” as stated in the Intergenerational Transmission of Trauma in Spiegelman’s ‘Maus’ by Kolar Stanislav, “Postmemory characterizes the experience of those who grow up dominated by narratives that preceded their birth, whose own belated stories are evacuated by the stories of the previous generation, shaped by traumatic events that can be neither understood nor recreated.” It is also evident that the trauma experienced by Holocaust survivors extends further than just individual families and touches whole communities too. The general memory of the Holocaust, with its loss of millions of lives, the destruction of communities, and the forced displacement of Jews, is something that most will never forget. This idea of a trauma that impacts a community, affects how later generations process their identity, culture, and relationship with others. An example of this is how Art’s experience in Maus reflects the struggles of Jewish communities who are still grappling with the loss of their ancestors, feeling the weight of the past without having directly lived it.

The impact of generational trauma is not only seen with Holocaust survivors and their descendants. Similar patterns of generational trauma can be seen in the descendants of survivors of other genocides, wars, and conflicts. An example of this could be the descendants of survivors of the Armenian genocide who also often face psychological challenges rooted in the unresolved grief and trauma of previous generations. These people may struggle with identity, a sense of vulnerability, or fear that their communities may again face persecution. The memories of these traumatic events, though passed down through storytelling, create a sense of emotional distress that affects every aspect of life. In terms of whether it is possible to move beyond generational trauma or if it’s better to live with it, I think it is hard to determine that. Recovering from generational trauma is possible, however, requires confronting the dreadful pain of the past. Acknowledging trauma, telling stories, and allowing space for emotional expression can help start the recovery from suffering. In Maus, Art’s decision to tell his father’s story through a graphic novel exemplifies how confronting and sharing the trauma can be a healing act. However, I think the process of healing is not necessarily that straightforward, and the trauma could potentially never fully be erased. For some people, living with the awareness of generational trauma can create a sense of resilience or empathy, while for other people, it can feel like more of a burden. In the end, it is not that the past should be erased, but to make it so that people and communities can learn and grow from the past and remember what happened in the past by moving forward from it and honoring the people who suffered.

Generational trauma impacts the children of Holocaust survivors because it is like a trickle-down effect that gets passed down from generation to generation. It is imposed and becomes a weight that the descendants must bear because of how historically large and traumatizing the event was. It becomes a responsibility for the children of the survivors and society as a whole to bring attention and recognition to these events in order to be able to move forward. For some people, this weight is a real burden, and others use it to voice for themselves and for others the problems that we are facing, along with our historical pasts. Spiegelman uses Maus as a way to cope with his inheritance from his father as a Holocaust survivor. Since Artie did not experience the Holocaust himself, he still experiences the guilt, and his situation isn’t helped by the fact that Vladek is so distant and disconnected from him. This generational trauma shapes people’s identities and the ways that they are able to connect and communicate with others. The weight of the traumatic experiences from direct ancestors can lead to troubles in connecting family, as shown with Vladek’s difficult relationship with his son, Artie. Artie is rude and repetitively sees his father as a burden in the novel, complaining about having to look after him. Of course, Artie’s ignorance comes from pressure and a feeling of having to live up to or. surpass what his father had doneecially when Vladek makes it clear that he is placing this pressure on Artie instead of it being indirect. Even with the death of Artie’s deceased brother, Richieu, he feels pressure to be able to be “perfect” because his competition is the image of a little boy who was innocent and perfect since he didn’t have the chance to be otherwise. Even in my own experience, with my mother fleeing conflict in her home country and my father working grueling hours, barely making a living, I feel the pressure to succeed and make sure that their efforts are validated and their struggle for a life or better yet “American Dream” is not in vain. My mother, as a little girl, would hide in a basement with her family as guerilla groups used their house as a fort, leaving the already feeble house bullet-riddled and destroyed. In a poor country, her only options were to sell bean scraps that were left over from harvests and ruled unworthy to be sold. Listening to the stories of my parents and their. struggles, I try to connect with them, but I know it's not possible because the whole purpose of their immigration was so that I would never understand what it is that they went through. My only option is to acknowledge their struggles, carry them on my back, and move forward. The question of whether its better to move beyond the trauma or just accept it and live with it is difficult because I cannot answer for everyone, and some trauma is deeper than others, but I can answer that in my so far short experience it has been easier to carry that weight and all of that trauma and use it as motivation to force myself into becoming someone better and more understanding of others, as well as making sure that what I create for myself is enough to ensure of their sacrifice and enough for me.

Through a multitude of ways, generational trauma can greatly impact the children of not only holocaust survivors but the children that come after it. The trauma that comes from events such as war has a very deep and great impact on the individual, causing them to exemplify certain behaviors that are specific to what they went through. One key example of this would be the fact that Vladek has his own forms of discrimination. His whole life, Vladek has been discriminated against over things he cannot control--the fact that he is jewish. As a result, different stereotypes have surrounded him his whole life, pushing him to believe that the hitchhiker--the one that is black--is a thief and will hurt them upon entering the car. As a result, although this is not necessarily the case for Artie, children of these survivors end up exhibiting these behaviors, making room for discrimination.

Even though events such as the Holocaust occurred so long ago, this does not change the fact that a lot of these beliefs are still persisting. There are no ways for these beliefs to completely disappear as they are engrained so deeply into our history, and continue to be taught whether purposefully or not. Trauma is a constant. It cannot just simply disappear or be created on a whim, affecting the everyday life of different ancestors. It also seems that the more these different generations learn about events such as the holocaust, the more it continues to live on. Intergenerational transmission of trauma in Spiegelman’s Maus mentions that “His identification with his parents’ affliction becomes so intense that he starts imagining being in Auschwitz” (Stanislav, 2013). Rather than living his own life, Art becomes so immersed in this one, causing him to lose a part of himself to the Holocaust. In some aspects, it is almost like it becomes his own story that he later retells.

In general, when looking at war trauma, there are a lot of different common results from war trauma that are harmful not only to the individual but also to the people surrounding them (the generations that come after them). A novel that I studied back in 10th grade fully exemplifies these things. The Things They Carried is a book that focuses on the Vietnam war, and displays the different ways people deal with trauma. Some people will tend to lash out, hurting the people around them. Some people tend to lack a lot of self-care, hurting themselves and the people who care about them as well. A lot of the time, after being in the military or participating in a war, the survivors will be sensitive to loud noises. Fireworks are common. As a result of this, they tend to shy away from these events, and restrict themselves from different forms of enjoyment because they can’t. Experience is a key part of an adolescents childhood, and a limitation on that is not necessarily positive.

At the same time, certain parts of this can be beneficial. It causes adolescents to be more aware about events as serious and impactful as the holocaust. This allows the children to be more understanding and mindful of how their actions may affect someone else. They can also be fairly well versed in their history. Generational trauma can have positive and negative effects.

Despite the simplicity of comic form, and particularly that of Spiegelman’s personal style, Maus effectively captures the emotions and story that it was meant to portray. At its heart, this is because intellectual gravity does not always need to be understood with a million words or overly detailed images. The heaviest subject matters are often conveyed through simpler mediums -- a way to articulate the innateness of human nature. By capturing the events that Spiegelman does, such as when Vladek learns of the public hangings of his smuggling acquaintances, to the scene where he first killed a Nazi soldier in a military camp, the message we are being told is not diluted by commentary of these events’ greater purpose to the narrative, or with visual cues of how the surrounding environment responds. Spiegelman simply captures Vladek’s emotions and thought process in the relatability of his facial expressions, and the dark, dreary atmosphere that the comic is drawn in. The reader must simply take it at its value, with their own understanding of human connection, and a connotation of this history, however little or much they might know about it. Though it may seem counterintuitive for a Holocaust story to be illustrated through such a crude style, in truth it is this manner that makes it such a raw, and at times distressing, read. In particular there is the spread in Maus where Artie is shown his college comic by Mala, and the audience is shown these pages as he reads through them himself. The art here is especially dramatic and difficult to follow along with -- everything is covered in shadow, features are exaggerated, and the capture of Vladek’s grief over Anja’s death is heartbreaking, but taken to such a high degree, it is also meant to be mortifying. It’s in this way that Spiegelman contrasts what Maus could have been with what that comic was -- attacking the reader with its messaging that this is a story about surviving and painting people into extreme, single-faceted versions of themselves. The way Vladek is portrayed here is exactly what a true-to-herat storyteller ought to avoid -- he is presented as having passions and goals centered only on his status of having been a victim, and tempts the audience to not empathize or relate to him, but question the validity of his emotions. The college comic is embarrassing for Artie because it is such a caricature of pain and suffering, and does too much trying to emphasize how awful and bad these events were, rather than the human presence of the people that had lived through them. It further highlights just how ingenius the rest of Maus‘s format is, with its simplistic but intentional art form. This is further supported by “The Shadow of a Past Time,” in which it is said that Spiegelman had intended this outcome as blending between “the presence of the past” with the “stylistic surface of a page” (5), and suggests that the use of art to explore his father’s story is in correspondence with Fredric Jameson’s theory that space -- that is, filling it with form and shade in context of Maus -- is the “perceptual modality of postmodernity” (7). By product, the argument that this medium lacks seriousness is actually more misguided than it is grounded in fact. Maus beautifully unfolds the story of Vladek, and trails back to the generational repercussions of all the themes and difficulties that it explores.

Generational trauma is a really common, and thorough idea that lingers within people from all different walks, especially in those that live ‘better’ lives than their parents or ancestors. I think that generational trauma shows up in a multitude of different ways for different people; Spiegelman highlighting specifically detachment, guilt, and argument. We see the idea of detachment expressed in the structuring of Maus. The block structure of a cartoon alone does this, but I think that Spiegelman uses this medium in order to add depth to both him and Vladek’s trauma. For example, in the scene with Vladek talking about his first son, we see him in three separate blocks pedaling faster and faster as if trying to get away from the memory of his dead son. In doing so, I think that Spiegleman is showing us a much broader concept within generational trauma which is detachment. There is a common response from those who’ve experienced trauma to detach themselves from it, as if what happened was another lifetime or almost another person. While Vladek goes into immense detail of his experience, the flashes to the present day show us a colder, disconnected personality. I think this becomes an inner monologue for the children of survivors who unconsciously separate themselves from their family’s trauma. In my own experience, I see this happen by family just not acknowledging or talking about the things that have happened. For those that went through the trauma, it is most likely a coping mechanism, a way to move on. But for the children of survivors, who didn’t actually experience the events, I think this becomes a detachment from the family; because they can’t have the emotions of someone who lived through the trauma, they instead learn to keep that pain hidden.

This idea goes hand in hand with a second idea Speigelman writes about, which is guilt. Based on Maus, and other stories I’ve read, I think that for children of Holocaust survivors, guilt seems to be one of the biggest weights they hold. There seems to be a guilt of ‘not suffering enough’; where children can never really complain or have struggles, because their problems are too small compared to that of their ancestors. There also seems to be a guilt of “fixing trauma”, where children feel powerless to help their obviously suffering parents. We see this with Artie, who really struggles to not only help his father, but find empathy for him after years of traumatic behavior. He gets really frustrated and annoyed with his dad, which I think comes from a place of wanting to fix him, but also wanting his father to already be ‘fixed’. In his article Intergenerational transmission of trauma in Spiegelman's Maus, Stanislav expands on this idea of guilt by talking about Artie’s meetings with a psychoanalyst. “The psychoanalyst suggests that even Art’s father feels guilty because he has survived while the others have not. Clinical studies describe how many survivors suffer from a sense of guilt for the same reason; however, Pavel’s point is that Vladek has transmitted his own survivor’s guilt onto Art. Art’s meetings with the psychoanalyst indicate that he defends himself against total identification with the victims of the Holocaust” (Stanislav 232). From this analysis, I think it is clear that guilt is such a deep, unclear thing that often leaves permanent marks on generations.

This leads me to the last point Spiegleman illustrates which is argument. Arguably, I think that this is one of the more common outcomes of generational trauma. Different perspectives on survival, identity, guilt, and emotions cause riff between most parent-child relationships, but with Vladek and Artie, carry an intense layer: genocide. Vladek’s world has been shaped by the Holocaust, and so everything will lead back to that experience for him. But for Artie, because of that detachment to the Holocaust, and guilt he carries to ‘fix’ it, I think his father’s trauma inadvertently feels like a burden or dark cloud that always hangs over them. Because of this, arguments are often and intense, which obviously is painful for both sides in this relationship, and seems to me a more tangible evidence of generational trauma- whether acknowledged or not.

To conclude, I think that generational trauma is not something that can be moved on from because it is ingrained in each partys’ brain, whether it shows up in fears, resentment, behaviors, or emotion. What’s more important, I think, is that we understand how this trauma has affected our relationships, and that we can speak about our different perspectives.

Stereotypically, graphic novels are considered a light-hearted and carefree read, suited only for children, due to their high volume of images. However, this common misconception is false and strays mature audiences from reading insightful, captivating stories. This is exemplified by Spiegelman’s Maus I and Maus II. These graphic novels are centered around a complex father-son relationship, detailing authentic experiences and memories of a Holocaust survivor. These novels not only shine a light on direct victims of the Holocaust but also highlight those indirectly affected, like the protagonist, Artie, who was born after the end of the Holocaust. Spiegelman’s use of the comic form is effective in conveying the emotional and historical weight that accompanies the Holocaust as it aids readers’ visualization of emotions. Despite not being realistic, the illustrations of both novels are certainly impressive and detailed. A realistic art style would lack in comparison, as less realistic art has the creative liberty of exaggerating expressions and body language, making characters’ emotions clearer. Additionally, with the comic form, Spiegelman is able to distinguish groups of people from each other easily, further aiding the reader’s understanding as well. He accomplishes this by illustrating different groups of people as different species. For example, Jewish people are drawn as mice, Germans are drawn as cats, and Polish people are drawn as pigs. This is effective for distinguishing different groups and also highlighting relationship dynamics between groups of people at the time. It is known that the common prey of cats is mice, similar to how Germans especially targeted Jewish people. Spiegelman’s portrayal of characters in this manner also puts into perspective the popular belief at the time that groups of people were not equal to the extent of people being considered different species. Furthermore, the format of the graphic novel is also beneficial for the movement between past and present, and the integration of the two, as it is clear and easy to differentiate between both. If the novels were stylized traditionally, it would be confusing for the reader to tell whether scenes were set in the past or the present. With the graphic novel format, the transition and integration between the two time periods is fluid and feels natural. The medium certainly doesn’t lack the seriousness needed to discuss the Holocaust, even with the illustrations of animals rather than humans, as it still effectively evokes strong emotional responses in the reader, such as empathy and remorse. The medium is also effective with its inclusion of a variety of types of images, aiding the reader’s visualization and understanding of experiences. For example, the novels provide diagrams and maps detailing the layout of different settings, like houses, in which hiding areas were showcased. With a greater comprehension of experiences,

readers are better able to understand the horrid nature of the Holocaust. All things being said, a graphic novel format should not deter readers from engaging with stories. The misconception that graphic novels/comic books are immature and unserious is foolish as they are effective in conveying messages not only through text but through visuals as well.

The children of Holocaust survivors never experienced the Holocaust but they experience the effects that it left on their parents. In Art’s life, his father was very strict with him and made an emphasis on saving money and not wasting food. Vladek learned these behaviors from his experience in the Holocaust as he had to cling to his money and rations to survive each day. Art’s mother, Anja, committed suicide after being struck with grief and anguish as a result of the Holocaust. Art can never truly understand what the Holocaust was like but he can only see the impact it left on his parents. Art’s childhood was also difficult as his parents were dealing with grief, anguish, and an array of feelings following the Holocaust. Art might’ve felt neglected or overlooked by his parents who were dealing with a lot on top of parenting. In the article, Intergenerational transmission of Trauma in Spiegelman’s Maus, Stanislav uses a quote from Art’s comic, Prisoner on the Hell Planet and says, “The accusatory tone of Art’s discourse culminates in the last panel when he even criminalizes her: ‘You murdered me, mommy, and you left me here to take the rap!!!’. The use of this part of Art’s comic exemplifies the emotional distress the Holocaust and Anja’s death brought Art as he felt alone and victimized both by Hitler and his mother. He blames Anja for leaving him alone with nobody else and for not leaving any final notes to him. Art might also feel survivor’s guilt as his people experienced something so horrible but he was born into a world where it no longer existed. One example of this would be the death of his older brother Richieu who was found by the SS and was poisoned by his caretaker. Art never felt the horrors and fear of the Holocaust and could feel that he might not be worthy to survive because he never had to go through such challenges. Trauma experienced by communities is passed onto the newer generations who haven’t experienced it and it leaves each generation with a traumatic experience even if they didn’t witness it firsthand. They gain a sense of fear and feel oppressed by other groups who have targeted their community in the past. For example, after slavery ended in the United States, many people carried on their trauma of mistreatment and brutality and passed it on to their children. Family members of former slaves still experience systemic racism as many African American communities struggle with violence, food insecurity, and employment discrimination. I believe that we should live with and acknowledge our generational traumas as moving on without acknowledging them can only lead to more issues. By confronting and dealing with the problem, then we can effectively move on. By not confronting our traumas, I feel that it is forgetting the struggles of our ancestors in a way that we just brush them off and continue to move on with our lives. A good balance of acknowledging our trauma and moving forward would be most beneficial as we recognize our ancestors but move forward in life to break this cycle.