Maus

One of the most beautiful stories ever told about the Holocaust. Art Spiegelman begins by narrating the life of his father, Vladek, a Polish Jew who escaped imprisonment in the concentration camps, and his conflictual relationship with him. Maus is not solely focused on the Shoah, however – above all, it's a story about people, the story of a relationship between father and son that also encompasses that tragic historical period, which is successfully described through real words and events that go straight to the heart of readers, also thanks to the great attention to detail paid to both illustrations and dialogues. The characters are represented like animals: the Nazis are cats who sadistically play with their prey, Jewish people are mice while Polish people are pigs. An allegorical representation that doesn't detract from the tragedy but impels us to reflect on the symbolic codes that had in fact been adopted by the Nazis, who referred to Jewish people as rats or parasites to be exterminated. The story unravels over two interwoven temporal planes: the author's present, when the father narrates, with difficulty, his life story to the son – a deeply painful memory and a heavy heritage for Art – and then the past, the years lived by Vlodek before and during the Second World War. Maus is a great literary work, as well as the first graphic novel to have been awarded the Pulitzer Prize – a must-read, so as to never forget.  

Maus
Art Spiegelman
Einaudi, 2010