Word: vladek
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Spiegelman's involvement with cartoons began as a child, when his father Vladek brought him horror comics. As a new American immigrant, said Spiegelman, Vladek was "not acculturated enough to know that these were the comics that created juvenile delinquency...
...working together to capture Vladek'sexperiences did bring him closer to his father,said Spiegelman. Vladek "liked the fact that hisson could sit in the same room withoutarguing...[The book] made it happen...
...Vladek tells how he adjusted to camp life and helped learn to survive by teaching English to a Polish kapo, or head prisoner--Poles are pigs, Germans cats, Americans dogs and French frogs in the cartoon world of Maus. The reader also learns of Vladek's attempts to help his wife, who was imprisoned in Birkenau, a much larger camp near Auschwitz. "There it was just a death place with Jews waiting for the gas," Vladek says...
...Maus would leave the reader breathless with disgust if Spiegelman did not often interrupt it to tell the story of his relationship with his father. The survivor's tale which seems the main thread of Maus's narrative is made more palpable as the reader gets to know Vladek both in camp life and "ordinary" life...
This second narrative draws the reader in and personalizes Vladek's unreal life in the death camps. The suffering which Art Spiegelman sensed under the surface of his family life comes alive. When Francoise and Artie cannot sleep because Vladek screams in his sleep, the effects of the holocaust upon those who lived through it becomes all the more tangible. Spiegelman has said that he grew up thinking it was normal to live in a house where people woke up screaming every night...