Maus and Me

 Maus and Me

You’ve probably been hearing a lot about Art Spiegelman’s book Maus recently.  His graphic memoir about the Holocaust was banned in Tennessee, and as a result, many of my Polish and Polish American friends on social media have been talking about it.

I’ve been a fan of Spiegelman’s Maus for a long time.  I first read this memoir about his father and his experiences in the Holocaust in 1990.  

My  connection with the book was almost instantaneous. Spiegelman and I shared so much. We both loved comic books for one thing. My great dream growing up was to write and draw comic books.  The dream never came true for me, but it became true for Spiegelman.  His graphic novel (i.e.  comic book) was the only one to ever win a Pulitzer Prize.  Another thing that connected us was that we both had Polish parents who were victims of the Germans.  My Catholic parents were sent to concentration and slave labor camps in Germany.  His Jewish parents went to Auschwitz. They all survived the war.  Finally, Art Spiegelman and I both wrote about our parents and the horrors they went through.  He wrote Maus and I wrote Echoes of Tattered Tongues: Memory Unfolded. Like I said, I like Maus very much, and when I was still teaching I used to teach the book as often as I could.  

The Tennessee ban on Spiegelman’s book is pretty ridiculous.  The school board banned it – not for it’s portrayal of the Holocaust – but for its use of curse words and some nudity. 

What surprised me more was the reaction on social media.  Many Poles and Polish Americans attacked Maus for what they felt was its negative portrayal of Poles during World War II and the Holocaust. In the book people of different nationalities are seen as different animals.  Jews are mice, Poles are depicted as pigs, Germans as cats, etc.   That Poles are pigs is offensive to some readers, but the biggest complaint I hear is that the Poles are depicted as bad.

Are there negative portrayals of Poles in Spiegelman’s Maus?  Yes, there are.  For example, some Poles prisoners are seen assisting the Germans in Auschwitz, some Poles are seen betraying Jews, and some Poles are said to have killed Jews during the war.  

Is the portrayal of Poles entirely negative?  No.  Poles are also seen warning Jews that Germans are coming, Poles are seen being threatened by the Germans, Poles are seen treating Jews they know like family.  

What finally are we to make of this?

For me, it seems clear.  War and its chaos and infinite deaths creates a situation like nothing we have ever imagined.  Some of us – whether Polish or Jewish or German – turn against others, and some of us don’t.  

My mother spent 3 years in a slave labor camp.  She survived because one of the Germans guards at the camp took pity on her.  My mother used to say there were good Germans and bad Germans, and she forgave the good ones.  

For me, this is one of the lessons of Spiegelman’s Maus.  Forgive the good people.

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My latest column for the Dziennik Zwiazkowy,  the oldest Polish newspaper in America.

Our First Year in Chicago

 Our First Year in Chicago

After working for a year on a farm outside of Buffalo, New York, to pay off our passage to America from the refugee camps in Germany, my family came to Chicago.  We were told that there was plenty of work there and that the work was easy.  We were told the work in Chicago was nothing like it had been in the slave labor camps in Germany or the farm outside of Buffalo. So my mom and dad and my sister Danusha and I took the Greyhound bus to Chicago.

That first year in Chicago, we were always moving from one place to another, from one kind of poverty to another kind of poverty that was a little easier on us.  When we first came to Chicago we had little money, so we had to live in the cheapest place.  It was a shed behind a bar on North Avenue.  Then as my parents found work we moved to another place and another place and another place.

We lived on Milwaukee Avenue, Hamilton Avenue, Belden Ave, North Avenue, Campbell Avenue, and Shakespeare Avenue.  We lived in Bucktown and Wicker Park and Humboldt Park.  We lived in sheds and two-room apartments and four-room apartments.  At one point, we even lived with four other Polish refugee families in one apartment and shared a bedroom with one of the families.  

In our first Chicago home, we slept on bare floors, and then when my parents made some money, we slept on mattresses on those bare floors, and then when my parents made more money, we slept in a small bedroom on two small mattress that were both too small, but still we somehow managed to sleep on them.  

No place was really home for much of that first year.  It was just someplace to gather and wait and hope as we looked around Chicago and tried to find the next place.  

And as we looked around we saw other Polish refugees just like us.  That was one of things that my parents loved about Chicago, the sense that we were here with so many people that had gone through the same experiences as we had, people who had lost their country and their families and their lives in the war, people who had the same dreams of finding new lives my family had.

My family loved that, and my family also loved the sense that there were no limits here to what we could dream and do.  For years my dad worked two shifts a week and my mom worked a midnight shift so that they could buy the home they dreamt of.  

Both of them had been ripped out of their homes by the Germans during the war and put in concentration and slave labor camps, and after the war they lived in a Displaced Persons camp for six years. and in all of those years they never felt that they had a home that was their own.  But Chicago with its jobs and opportunities gave them that chance to own a home.

Three years after coming to Chicago, they bought a three-story building on Potomac Ave.  Looking back on it now, I shake my head as I think about what a dump it was.  It had three small apartments and no central heating and a basement with a dirt floor, but still it was a home to my family, and my mom and dad felt like they had achieved a life that they never dreamed of in the camps during the war.  Now, they were landlords!

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This article first appeared in the Dziennik Zwiazkowy.