Maus: A Survivor's Tale Vladek Spiegelman Quotes

In this quote, Vladek hears about the treatment of Jews in Germany. No longer regarded as full citizens, they are the victims of state-sanctioned violence.

Ironically, Vladek is safer as a Polish war prisoner than as a Jew in Germany. In matters of war, international convention prevails: war prisoners are entitled to certain basic rights. A Jew within the Reich, on the other hand, is subject to German laws, not international ones.

The Nazis’ persecution of the Jews extended to all areas of life. The Jews’ property and wealth were taken away, and they were left with few options for making a living. Vladek loses his factory and must make do with what he can earn on the black market.

Vladek narrowly escapes the anti-Semitic violence sweeping through Sosnowiec. In this particular episode, Jews have been rounded up at random and beaten for no reason.

This is just one of the many descriptions of the horrible conditions Jews had to suffer when they were incarcerated.

The Nazis had so effectively infiltrated all aspects of life in Sosnowiec that Vladek and Anja had nowhere to go, even though they had escaped being shipped off to Auschwitz.

This is a particularly tragic scene where Vladek reflects on the radical changes his life went through,

Just one of the many nightmarish images of brutality in the book. The human body is stripped of everything that makes it recognizably human, reduced to bones and fat. Even dead, the captive Jews are not allowed the smallest dignity.

Considered racially inferior, the Jews are treated like animals. This is one of many scenes where Jews are held in structures or cars that were initially built for animals.

These types of Selektions are common scenes in the novel, where the Jews who are able to work are separated off from those deemed infirm, elderly, or immature.

The violence toward children is particularly difficult to stomach. Young children were sent to the gas chambers because they weren’t old enough to work. And Tosha is put in the impossible position of killing her own children, and her nephew Richieu, as a kind of mercy killing.

The horror stories Vladek hears in Quote #2 become reality when he enters Auschwitz.

The numbers assigned to each of the prisoners further dehumanizes them.

We get another image of Nazi bureaucracy at work with their obsessive counting at the Appel, or roll call. With Vladek’s own obsessive counting (of his pills, crackers, the money in his checking account), we have to wonder if his neuroses have some origin in his experience with the Nazis.

Auschwitz has become the name that most people associate with the Holocaust, but it was Birkenau where over a million Jews lost their lives.

Here’s a role reversal: the doctors are used not to cure the patients, but to kill them off.

Vladek’s careful hoarding during his concentration camp days is a survival tactic. But outside the concentration camp, it looks like a pathological compulsion (see Quote #8 above).

“And here my troubles began” is the subtitle for Book II. It’s kind of ironic, since the statement suggests that Vladek’s troubles didn’t begin in Auschwitz or during the German occupation of Poland. The statement gives us a sense of how deplorable the conditions were at Dachau.

Vladek can exploit racial stereotypes in this situation. The soldiers are thinking in a racist way: according to the stereotype, Jews should be easily identifiable by their features alone, and they should exhibit cowardly behavior. Vladek can pass undetected because he breaks these stereotypes.

Four words: racism begins at home.