Sample of an “A” Paper by Carissa Wells
Evaluation of Events
In Maus II by Art Spiegelman,
the main character is Vladek Spiegelman,
a holocaust survivor that is recollecting his memories of the holocaust for his
son, Art. The first camp that the Nazis send Vladek
is Auschwitz. Vladek
survives in this death camp for ten months by doing various jobs, such as
working in a tin shop, repairing shoes, and even teaching English to one of the
kapos in the quarantine (Spiegelman 68).
Towards the end of his stay there, as well as the end of the war, Vladek is among a group of men that are chosen to dismantle
the gas chambers. Since the Allies were coming and Germany could not hold
them back, the plan was to dismantle the gas chamber in Auschwitz and have it
shipped to Mauthhausen/Gusen, where it was to be
reconstructed (Perz
1). While Vladek is dismantling the gas
chambers, he meets a member of the sonderkommandos.
These men were the ones responsible for taking the corpses out of the gas
chambers after the Zyklon-B had fulfilled its ghastly purpose. While
these men were seen as “unclean” and “akin to collaborators” of the Nazis by
fellow inmates (Shields 2), these men were not doing this job out of
choice. In Maus II, the prisoner
that Vladek meets goes into grisly detail concerning
how the bodies look once the sonderkommandos have to
enter the gas chambers to do their job. Vladek
does not want to hear this and lets the man know this. Vladek recalls, “I didn’t want more to hear, but anyway he
told me”(Spiegelman
71).
From the text, it
sounds like this prisoner wants to talk about it, but it is hard to tell if it
is because he wants to get it off his chest or because he finds it
interesting. According to Jacqueline Shields, the writer of the article “Sonderkommando,” these men were offered this position in an
ultimatum form: be a sonderkommando, or be killed
immediately (Shields 1). True to the instinct of self-preservation, the
majority of the recruits accepted the grisly
job, in return for better food portions and living conditions. In Maus II, the prisoner that Vladek meets is wearing the same prisoner uniform that Vladek is, but according to Shields, that is
inaccurate. In reality, they did not even have to wear the striped pr ison garb; they were free to wear normal clothing (Shields
1). All this, however, came with a price. The Nazis obviously did
not want any evidence of their actions, which included potential
witnesses. The sonderkommandos’ accounts would
be perfect evidence against them in the future, unless they were dealt
with. To be safe, the Nazis replaced the sonderkommandos
with a new team every few months and sent the old group to be gassed (Spiegelman 70). Once again, the gas chambers were a
way of increasing the amount of casualties without causing the guards permanent
mental damage from continuous murder. All the guards had to do was put
the Zyklon-B and a catalyst in the slots above the chambers. If they saw
the victims before they entered the chambers, they certainly did not
after. It is easier to kill when one does not see what the result is.
Towards the end of
the war, Vladek, along with thousands of other
inmates, are taken from Auschwitz towards Dachau.
According to the Shoah
Resource Center,
which is affiliated with Yad
Vashem, conditions in Dachau
got much worse when these thousands of inmates arrived. A typhus epidemic
swept through the camp, and claimed100 to 200 inmates
a day (“Dachau” Yad
Vashem 3). This is exactly what Vladek remembers from his stay at Dachau.
He said that many people died from typhus on their way to the bathroom,
so there were “dead people piled there [the hallway to the bathroom]…You had to
go on their heads, and this was terrible, because it was so slippery, the
skin…So now I had ty phus,
and I had to go to the toilet down, and I said, ‘Now it’s my time.
Now I will be laying like this ones and somebody will
step on me!’”(Speigelman 95).
According to Yad Vashem,
the inmates of Dachau were always
under the “cruel treatment” of the guards (Yad Vashem 2). This can be seen especially in the
distribution of food. According to Vladek, the guards
would check an inmate’s shirts for lice, and if there were any, the inmate
would not get any food. This is especially cruel since the lice were
everywhere, which is what caused the typhus epidemic. It was in Dachau
that the primal instinct was truly seen in Maus
II. Vladek remembers what it was like,
saying, “God forbid, if someone got soup and someone spilled him a
drop…Like wild animals they would fight until there was blood. You can’t
know what it is, to be hungry”(Spiegelman
91). This cruel treatment concerning food distribution is not surprising
since the Nazis were constantly finding ways to make the inmates, be they
Jewish, Gypsies or homosexual, to appear more and more like a humanoid creature
that was below the “pure” Aryan race. By doing this to inmates, the Nazis
were able to cause the inmates to be forced to resort to their primal instincts
of self-preservation to the extreme, which caused many, as Vladek
said, to act like “wild animals” (Spiegelman
91). The further the Nazis got the Jews to appear as inferior “species”,
the easier it would be to justify “exterminating” them.
Internet Literature Review
Stormfront.org.
2 Apr. 2005. Stormfront: White Pride World Wide. 2 Apr. 2005. www.stormfront.org/revision/ffszyklon-B.html.
This site was
among the results for the search using “zyklon-B”.
This site offered a very in-depth fact sheet about the chemical, which included
boiling point, solubility in water and hazards of the chemical in the case of
storage. The fact that this is even on a White Nationalist web site is
very surprising, since the site denies that this was ever actually used for
mass extermination of inmates in the Holocaust. While the site offers the
history of the chemical as a pest extermination tool, it denies that the camps
used them with the homicidal and malicious intent, saying, “Zyklon-B would be a
forgotten footnote of World War II except for the allegation that it was used
as a poisonous gas to execute millions of concentration camps inmates (Stormfront)”. This site even goes on to state that the gas
was merely used to exterminate the vermin that were causing sickness in the
camps, therefore the Nazis were trying to reduce the death tolls. While
it may be true that Zyklon-B was used as a
extermination of lice and other vermin, this site does not provide proof that
the Nazis did not just kill vermin with this gas. It also says that some camps
that “were designated by experts to be
extermination camps used the same Zyklon to kill inmates…Therefore, deliveries
of Zyklon to Dachau were beneficial and humane while delivery of Zyklon to
Auschwitz was criminal” (Stormfront). This
writer is contradicting himself, since all camps were intended to kill, not
just certain camps that were “designated by
experts”, which is a term that the writer fails to elaborate on. The fact
that this site denies the deliberate mass murders of the Holocaust by the Nazis
casts serious doubt on anything that this site posts. On its home page, Stormfront displays various news updates, each with an
emoticon expressing the sites opinions and thoughts. The article, “Mississippi:
Highway stretches renamed to honor civil rights victims” is beside
a thumbs down icon, while the article, “British historian David Irving
to appear on C-Span” gets a thumbs up. The use of emoticons also
seriously casts doubts on the sites credibility; apart from the fact that it is
a White Nationalist site, it can hardly be said to be free of bias and be more
factual than opinionated. One last
interesting feature of this site was the color choice for the colors of the web
page.&nb sp; One is able
to choose from a wide variety of colors, but the default color is, not
surprisingly, “white liquid”.
Yad Vashem. Apr.
2005. Yad Vashem: The
Holocaust Martyr’s and Heroe’s
Remembrance Authority. 2 Apr. 2005. http://www1.yadvashem.org/odot_pdf/Microsoft%20Word%20-%206242.pdf.
This site was useful because it offered an article that had plenty of
information on the Dachau
concentration camp. This site is made by Yad Vashem, a non-profit organization that relies on donations
and sponsorships. Yad Vashem
is responsible for the documentation of the Jews during the Shoah
(“About Yad Vashem”, Yad Vashem). In fact, this
site has a name database were they have collected
names and information about millions of the victims that died during the
Holocaust. In fact, Yad Vashem
has been able to collect information of about half of the estimated
six million people that died dur ing
the Holocaust. Yad Vashem
also claims to be a “pioneer of Holocaust museums worldwide”(“Mission
Statement” Yad Vashem,),
and is dedicated to research and education
programs concerning the Shoah. Furthermore, the
main headquarters of Yad Vashem
is in Jerusalem, which gives it a
better advantage at research and education, as well as credibility. This
site is very credible and has given no reason to doubt the information that it
gives. The information that was given in the “Dachau”
article was perfectly accurate to the accounts given by Maus
II concerning Dachau. On page 3
of the article, it mentions that before Dachau
was liberated, thousands of other prisoners
were brought from other camps and therefore, it was overcrowded and the
conditions worsened considerably (Yad Vashem 3). Vladek was among
those thousands of inmates since he was brought there towards the end of the
war from Auschwitz. He also mentions the terrible
conditions and the typhus epidemic within the camp, which caused a large number
in fatalities. The Dachau
article mentions all this, which increases its credibility since it does not go
against what a survivor experienced first hand.
Most Important Scene
One of the most important scenes of this text does not occur during the Shoah. Instead, it occurs decades later as the author, Art Spiegelman, is in the process of recording his father’s
memories of his experience of the Holocaust. In this scene, Art, his wife
Francoise and Vladek are driving home from the
store. Suddenly, Francoise stops the car to pick up a hitchhiker, who
happens to be an African American man. Vladek panics,
saying, “It’s a colored guy, a SHVARTSER! PUSH QUICK ON THE GAS!”(Spiegelman 98). While the
man is in the car, Vladek is mumbling racist remarks
in Polish. Once they let the man out at his destination, Vladek scolds Francoise for what she has done, and makes a
comment about he had to watch the groceries to make sure the man did not steal
anything. At this, Francoise is enraged, saying, “That’s OUTRAGEOUS! How
can you, of all people, be such a racist! You talk about blacks the way the
Nazis talked about the Jews!” (Spiegelman
99). In reply, Vladek says, “I thought
really you are more smart than this, Francoise…it’s not even to compare, the shvartsers and the Jews!” (Spiegelman 99). Vladek
claims that his view of African Americans is due to his “experience” with them
in New York, saying, “…there it [New
York] was shvartsers
everywhere, and if I put down only for one second my valuables, they took!”(Spiegelman 100). This is a
very depressing scene, mainly due to how Vlade k
reacts. It is as if he learned nothing from his horrific experience during the
Holocaust. In fact, this scene reveals that Vladek
and the Nazis have something in common: ignorance. According to the text, Vladek arrived in New York
a few years after the end of World War II. He was a young man who had the ability
to know better than to make generalizations and to trust stereotypes. However,
he has one or two bad memories (Vladek never mentions
if he actually saw any African Americans actually steal his stuff, he seems to
assume it) and decides that this is what to expect from a whole group of
people. This scene really stuck out because it was simply dripping with
irony that everyone but Vladek could see. It is
also very sad because Vladek, along with millions of
Jews, experienced the most extreme persecution and prejudice, yet Vladek does not seem to learn from it. One would
think that a person under severe persecution would be less likely to form
stereotypes and overgeneralizations. The truth is, however, that persecution
does not always bring people from different groups together. Even within
the walls of the death camps, bias and prejudice was alive among the
prisoners. Certain prisoners looked down on others and hated
them simply because they were homosexual or of a different ethnicity.
Prejudice seems to be like a cockroach; despite the fact that it is a terrible
creature, it is able to live through almost anything. Nothing is able to
kill it, not even experiences like those shared by the millions of inmates at
death camps like Auschwitz.
Appeal to Authority
During his stay in
Auschwitz, Vladek appeals to
the authority of the Nazis in order to stay alive, but he puts even more effort
into appealing to the love of his wife, Anja.
While he is in Auschwitz I, she is in Auschwitz II Birkenau (Speigelman 51).
Even though there is a great distance between them, Vladek
finds ways to see her and keep in contact with her. For example, while Vladek worked in the tin shop in the summer of 1944, he was
able to work on the roofs of some of the women’s barracks, which enabled him to
see her. He also tried very hard to keep in contact with her through
letters, which Mancie, the leader of Anja’s group, would in turn give to Anja
(Spiegelman 52 ). He also managed to give Anja food packages, which in one instance cost him a brutal
beating from an S.S. officer (Spiegelman 57).
Even though he needed his ration of food in order to be healthy enough to pass
selections, he still risked his life to get food to Anja
in order to keep her nourished and to appear healthier than she really
was. Towards the end of the fall in 1944, Vladek
basically starves himself in order to get enough food to be able to use for
bribes and exchanges. Using this precious commodity of bread, he is able
to arrange for Anja to be moved from Birkenau to some women’s barracks in Auschwitz
I. Remembering this, Vladek says, “And with
them [the women] was Anja. This I
arranged. It was the only time I was happy in Auschwitz”(Spiegelman 64). It is obvious
that Vladek had his own survival in mind; if he did
not, he would not have tried so hard to survive and would have most likely
become a musselman and be sent to the gas
chambers. Despite Vladek’s strong sense of
self-preservation, there were times when this instinct took second place to the
preservation of his wife. He was willing to risk his life in order to
keep her alive so she could survive through the horrific nightmare that they
found themselves unable to escape.
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