Maus and Musings on the Holocaust

By Paul Gessing

I was doing some “light” reading over the holidays. Actually, I picked up a copy of the book “Maus: A Survivors Tale” and the thing was that I couldn’t put it down. I’d seen the book before, but never really had the chance to get started reading it. Now that I’ve had the chance, I highly recommend it for anyone interested in learning about the terrors of the holocaust and the terrible things that happened as a result of Hitler’s attempt to exterminate an entire race of people from the planet.

First and foremost, the book is in a cartoon format with Jews portrayed as mice and Germans portrayed as cats. Poles and other “non-aligned” characters are pigs while the Americans are portrayed as friendly dogs. The combination of the momentous events of the holocaust, the compelling story, and the graphic comic-style portrayal make this book the best I’ve read on the holocaust. Certainly, the characters have a broader perspective on world events than did Anne Frank and while Elie Wiesel’s Night was broad in its portrayal of the Holocaust, Maus’s comic format makes it even more powerful and thus memorable.

While I could stop at simply offering my wholehearted support for this book as a way to learn more about the terrors of the holocaust, the fact that a recent conference was held to essentially deny the fact that the holocaust ever happened had me pondering whether such a thing could happen again.

After all, what Hitler tried to do was much different than run-of-the-mill ethnic cleansing. Ethnic cleansing is the result of one group of people killing or expelling another group of people from a particular area, but the object is not the extermination rather it is the land. The expulsion of Native Americans from the U.S. and the Kosovo-Serbia conflict in the former Yugoslavia are but two examples.

Hitler, on the other hand often sacrificed military aims in order to carry out his ultimate mission of obliterating the Jews. In addition, his systematic efforts to stoke anti-Semitic sentiment and subsequent use of massive death camps are unprecedented in scale in history.

So, could the Holocaust happen again? Personally, I doubt it. Not that human nature is any more evolved than it was in the 1930s and 40s. Rather, I think it is technology that would prevent this from happening again.

First and foremost, there is the automobile. The widespread existence of individual modes of transportation would make it far more difficult to herd large groups of people into ghettos than it once was.

Secondly, the explosion in telecommunications from computers and the Internet to hand-held cameras would make it far more difficult for someone like Hitler to keep his plans under wraps. Although it is true that many people knew what was going on in Germany and even many Jews who wound up in the concentration camps knew of their existence, it seems far more likely that more information dispersed worldwide would make these occurrences less likely.

The final reason that another holocaust seems extremely unlikely to occur is that while human nature has not changed, I think that people have become less willing to blindly follow authority. Perhaps this is my American-centric view, but I was struck in reading Maus that the victims went so quietly to their deaths. Sure, there were isolated cases of resistance, but there were also Jews and others who were willing to assist in the killing of their fellows in exchange for favored status. With all of the information available to people nowadays, it would seem that even Europeans would be unwilling to comply.

No matter what you think personally about this question, only time will tell. For a fuller understanding of the issue and in order to put yourself in the mindset of someone who ultimately escaped death in Auschwitz, you must read Maus.

Paul Gessing is a senior editor for The Free Liberal.