Prize-winning is right! This was all I'd heard about and so much more. Brutally honest and the perfect balance of cartoon and reality.
Summary:
American artist and writer Art Spiegelman details his father, Valdek's, experience of the Holocaust and surviving Auschwitz and Dachau. The reader sees it just like Art hears it, with "present" talks with Valdek and "current" frustrations interwoven with stories from a horror-filled but very real past.
Verdict: 10/10
There's no other term than genius for this. When you hear most Holocaust stories, the victims only have one role: victim. They almost don’t seem real. They’re painted as survivors or heroes. Spiegelman paints an honest picture of his dad’s experience - before, during and after the war. He doesn’t sugarcoat or shy away from the difficult relationship he had with his father. All the angers and frustrations with Valdek's hoarding and idiosyncrasies, his racism towards blacks, his new relationship with his wife, or even his relationship with Art's mother, Anja, and her suicide decades after the war was over.
All this depicts an authentic, relatable person and family. It complicates a story that would otherwise be written off as simple history and transforms it into something more tangible.
It’s odd, but we’ve been desensitized to a lot of the horrors of the Holocaust. There's so many stories that we hear from that time (and so many that we never will). We’ve heard of the crematoriums and purges and ghettos. But I never heard about what happened after Auschwitz in Dachua. It’s a miracle anyone made it out alive
I wasn’t sure I was going to like the animal depiction. It can seem a bit strange to an outside observer. At first, I thought it was to help the reader really picture the divisions at the time. Germans didn't think Jews were the same species as them. So it's apt to portray them differently and further cement those lines of who was good and bad and enemies or allies. That may be a little polarizing, but that's probably how it felt to the Jews of Poland, utterly isolated.
But really, I think the animals are what help make the horror bearable. We see cartoon mice being beat up on TV all the time, but many couldn't stand the gore of the Nazis or stomach the image of skeletal Jews in 300 pages of graphic drawings. The art helped make it relatable, engaging, and innocent when nothing else in the setting is.
I can't say enough in praise of this graphic novel, which usually means I should stop. Just go read the book so you can find all this out yourself.
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