I can't even BEGIN to imagine

  

 In 1986 Art Spiegelman published “Maus”, a graphic novel that tells the story of his father during the Holocaust. He based the novel on his father’s memoirs, photographs and a personal research. But he, just as many of us, did not live all the brutalities that happened during the holocaust can we sympathize with such a living nightmare? Why did Art Spiegelman chose tell his father story?

   This story is about Art Spiegelman’s father, Vladek Spiegelman, who is a survivor of Auschwitz. It is narrated by his father’s own experiences. The way the story is told serves for the reader to understand that Art’s father is not a hero but someone who by chance and with the help of money, could survive the holocaust. Moreover, Art who is very attentive to his father story no matter interested is in the narrative he cannot fully comprehend the feelings and sensations that his father try to convey in his story.

   Sympathize with someone who has been through a tough situation is something that almost everyone had done in the past. Sometimes we don’t want to do it but it happens anyways, and in order to make that person who is suffering to feel better we come up with the famous words: “I know you must be feeling terrible” or something like that.

   What I mean  is that we can’t feel what someone else felt or is feeling since we are all different from each other, but we try to do it anyways en order to feel less guilty, as it is expressed in Maus II pag. 16 where Art confesses that “I know this is insane, but I somehow wish I had been in Auschwitz with my parents so I could really know what they lived through! I guess it’s some kind of guilt about having had an easier life than they did”.

   Yet Spiegelman in his comic does not try to appeal to our sensibility by glorifying is father just because he survived; on the opposite he attempts to express through the plot and later affrims in an interview that his father is a regular person with lots of defects and not because he had been through unimaginable suffering he is has become better person.(Spiegelman,2011)

   Then the second question remains: why did Spiegelman chose to tell his father story? Based on what I read from an interview made to Spiegelman and from the novel itself, his main objective was to make people, who did not lived during that time realize whether it is possible or not to comprehend for real what the holocaust meant and was for those who actually lived it. But I can honestly say that I can’t even begin to imagine what the holocaust survivors went through.   

Cooke, R.. (2011). Art Spiegelman. The Guardian,  17-08-2015, www.theguardian.com