The Memories Of The Holocaust Essay

Also, the memory of the Holocaust has proven to be unbearable as it has left long lasting mental effects on the characters. The Nazi government systemically attacked and persecuted the Jews with brutal violence and sent millions of them to concentration camps. As a result, Spiegelman’s family has been traumatized and has “children of holocaust survivors growing up with the simultaneous presence and absence of the Holocaust memory in their lives” (Kohli, 2012, p. 2). In fact, “Maus is not about one survivor or one level of survival, but instead about the varied layers and contradictory exemplifications of survivor and survival”, it is about the future generations constructing their identities in relation to the Holocaust (Kohli, 2012, p. 2, 14). Based on the impact the Holocaust left on his father, Spiegelman finds himself as a victim of his father’s past as the memories of the Holocaust have not only shaped the lives of the survivors and their children, but it has victimized multiple generations (Kohli, 2012, p. 14). The artwork on the front cover of Maus also portrays the stains left by the Holocaust in the minds of survivors as the mice sit underneath Adolf Hitler’s cat face and a Swastika. Having the Swastika and the face of the Nazi leader’s drawing on the cover is Spiegelman’s tactic to make the reader foresee the epigraph and the anti-Semitism presented in Maus (Ewert, 2000, p. 92).
Likewise, the use of the epigraph of Adolf Hitler at the beginning of the graphic novel…