Maus by Vladek Spiegelman - animals to represent Poles?

I think the Nazis should have been portrayed as pigs, since they were as ludicrously power mad as the pigs in Orwell's "Animal Farm".

You Sir are completly right with your last statement, it's "some of that and some of that" that is right and logically correct. You are a benefit to humanity and your name will be remembered for generations to come.

I don't see any indications of antisemitism going along with the content of your comment. Your sarcastic reference is well noted and only a complete idiot would not realize its geniality.

You are really a man between men unlike the others in this forum excluding Socrates whom I also like a lot!

Maybe he wanted to show that they were slaughtered. Honestly, I don't see any scenario where the depiction of Poles as pigs is not derogatory. I think its very insensitive to portray them this way, as even if there were a number of Nazi-collaborators, there were so many innocent others that perished.

Thats like saying "i used sh*t to portray people in good will" Spiegelman is an anti-polish sh*t.


Its not, Spiegelman invented it.

Okay, just came across this. It doesn't matter how the Poles were portrayed, nor the Jews, nor the Germans (some of whom would've been nazis, some not, all cats) what matters is that the holocaust in history reduces these people, all of different characters, to three mere factions of jews poles and nazis without individual identity - the holocaust overshadowed each and everyone of them.

vladek numerous times alludes to how everyone was out for themselves, especially when times were hard (the jewish council for example, giving up the old to the nazi's) it is not as black and white as the colours of the pages imply. it is simply truth from a perspective, and what animals each race were has little to do with it other then a dogs chase cats, cats chase mice, pigs are neutral sort of way. and even then, none of those apply as a whole to any of the peoples involved. it's not a simple topic.

Here's a better one by my Philly homeboy R.Crumb:

honestmediatoday.com/God_damn_Jews1.htm

Another good Crumb cartoon:

heretical.com/miscella/rcnoa.html

I really sorry for the people and why is this things happened like seriously thats sad and makes mi angry at the same time..

Actually, it's my understanding that all nationalities might be kapos, even Jews. Nachama Tec notes that she's never heard of a Polish concentration camp guard. The impression left by Maus is that Poles ran the camps with the Germans. Not true. There were many volunteer battalions of police from other nations subjected to Nazi rule, 13 from one nation alone, and these auxilliaries, with the Germans, pretty much ran the Holocaust. No Polish battalions. Polish collaboration, the most recent studies (Barbara Engelking, Jan Grabowski) by brave Polish historians, indicate most of the collaboration took place on the level of local police against escaped Jews. Some participated enthusiastically, with the help of peasants who wanted the Jews' property and the bounty on their heads. Not content with that, the Nazis posted the names of local Polish men who would be executed first if the police didn't catch enough Jews. Timothy Snyder (author of Bloodlands) estimates in a book review that the Poles might have been responsible for as many as 125,000 Jewish deaths. This is horrible. And it goes against the Polish myth of no collaboration. But it accounts for about 2% of the 6 million. And how many of the 30,000,000 Poles does it implicate? Quite probably, as Gunnar Paulsson notes in Secret City, the vast majority of Poles never saw a Jew during the war. (In Warsaw, Paulsson, doing stringent analysis of data, estimates over 90% never had anything to do with Jews, who were strictly segregates, 5% helped Jews, less than 1% betrayed them). Paulsson and Janina Bauman (who wrote a great memoir about surviving the Warsaw ghetto uprising) both guess that it took maybe 10 poles to save one Jew, and 1 collaborating Pole to turn in 10 Jews to the Nazis. Perhaps I've gone overboard on facts, but I find that preferable to just slinging around my generalizations about the essential morality of ethnic groups, a past time that never seems to get old for some people.