One question asked today in class was why are the races portrayed the way they were in Maus. I think they made the Nazi’s mice not only because the cats, which were the Germans, eat the mice but also because they are small and to most people disgusting. We lay out traps to kill mice that run around the house. Back then, all Jews were seen as "dirty creatures" who had no right to a good life like everyone else. The Germans destroyed their identity, tore apart their families, and ruined their homes. By making the Jews mice I think Art Spigelman showed readers how the Germans really did look at the Jews. They saw them as creatures they could walk all over and do as they pleased with.
As for people denying the Holocaust, someone mentioned in class people don’t want to believe people are really that cruel. It is hard to think that one race could really kill so many people and not feel bad about it and that everyone else could just stand around and let it happen. However, there is way to much evidence and pictures and so forth to even question whether it did or not. Holocaust survivors would not make up a story that detailed and troublesome. When I went to the Holocaust museum and heard this lady tell us her story, I just sat there feeling sorry for her. I know that may be a bad thing but I just thought what she experienced was horrible. I don’t know if I could have made it. It definitely makes you question how people can be so cruel and cold hearted, and why one race thinks they are so much better then another. The Germans thought they were so much better and that they had the right to destroy another whole race.
A third question I want to respond to is why didn’t the Jews fight back? Although at one point in time they out numbered the Germans, they didn’t fight back because they didn’t think that was the answer. I’m sure they didn’t think things were that bad and that if they did as they were told everything would be ok. But there did come a point when they knew how bad things were and still didn’t do anything. If they fought back would it really have made a difference? I don’t think so. I’m curious to what others think about that. Could the number of Jews killed been cut down if they would have fought back and others would have stepped in to help?
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The Holocaust deniers are exactly whom Arendt had in mind when she said that if the crime is big enough, people are unlikely to believe it. Just this year, Iran held a conference of Holocaust deniers and skeptics. Many of these people were accomplished in their fields and there were even some anti-Zionist rabbis attending the event. Almost all governments rejected the conference and criticized it but we should ask ourselves why this type of thing can still happen in the year 2007? Iran's president claimed that the conference was intended to call into question Palestinian suffering at the hands of Israel, but most reasonable people saw through this claim.
There is no doubt that the evidence is convincing enough but some people just do not think that it is logistically possible to kill 10 million people and have almost no one know about it at the time. As for the question of why didn't the Jews fight back, what good would it have done? If anything it would have made their situation worse. And the Jews in the ghetto didn't know of the unspeakable atrocities that awaited them. They had made it that far and figured that it couldn't get much worse. They heard stories of the concentration camps but again, it goes back to the idea that if the crime is big enough people will not be apt to believe it. They heard these stories but many were skeptical. Also, most felt that the war would be rather quick, and that things would soon return to normal.
below is a quote pulled from arthur silbur's blog -- he offers an author's insight into the German psyche before WWII-- (In his complete post/argument, Silbur is not looking at Germans per se, but the quote may add insight into Maus)
http://powerofnarrative.blogspot.com/
In "Thus the World Was Lost," I set forth several excerpts from Milton Mayer's, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45. Mayer quotes one German, who said:
"You know," he went on, "when men who understand what is happening--the motion, that is, of history, not the reports of single events or developments--when such men do not object or protest, men who do not understand cannot be expected to. How many men would you say understand--in this sense--in America? And when, as the motion of history accelerates and those who don't understand are crazed by fear, as our people were, and made into a great 'patriotic' mob, will they understand then, when they did not before?
"We learned here--I say this freely--to give up trying to make them understand after, oh, the end of 1938, after the night of the synagogue burning and the things that followed it. Even before the war began, men who were teachers, men whose faith in teaching was their whole faith, gave up, seeing that there was no comprehension, no capacity left for comprehension, and the thing must go its course, taking first its victims, then its architects, and then the rest of us to destruction. ..."
I also offered parts of Mayer's recounting of the story of a chemical engineer, who first refused to take the "oath of fidelity" to the Nazi government, but finally did. When Mayer said that he didn't understand the engineer's reasons for contending that he should not have taken the oath, since the engineer did in fact save many innocent lives, the engineer replied:
"Perhaps not," he said, "but you must not forget that you are an American. I mean that, really. Americans have never known anything like this this experience--in its entirety, all the way to the end. That is the point."
I think that a lot of people who were not Holocaust survivors look at the horrors of the genocide and do not know how to react but to be horrified. Those who are the descendants of survivors feel guilty. It is as if they can never be worthy, can never complain about anything, because look at what they lived through. How can anything compare? I think that the thing we forget is that we look at genocide as a piece of history. That’s so horrible that all those people got dehumanized and eventually killed. That’s terrible that over 11 million people were killed for no reason, with no guilt of a crime, for no good reason.
Well, I agree, it was horrible. What’s even more horrible is that something that horrible lies in our history, and yet we still allow it to continue today. We know about things like the genocide in Darfur, Ethiopia, Congo, and all around the world; yet we still take no action. I think that something even better than feeling bad about the Holocaust would be to learn from it. The only thing worse than all those people dying, is that we have not learned from their pointless deaths. How can the world stand by while these injustices are continuing? Ok, the first time we had the excuse that it was so horrific and unimaginable, that how could we know that it was really happening? But now we know that humans are quite capable of doing such things. Yet, we still turn the blind eye.
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