Why Did Hitler Hate Jews So Much - Essay Example

The paper "Why Did Hitler Hate Jews So Much" is a good example of a history essay. Maus I and II is Art Spiegelman’s story of his father’s experience of the War and his troubled relationship with him? It is a biography, an autobiography, and a historical memoir at the same time, all told in a comic and graphic medium. The Jews are represented as mice while the Nazis are represented as cats. This metaphor is derived from Adolf Hitler’s propaganda that the Jews were mice. The drawings and speeches in the comic do not belittle the holocaust.

It, however, depicts history personally and globally accurately and unconventionally. The comic increases the probability of the wounds and warnings of the holocaust living forever in the minds of people.  Maus shows that the Holocaust was not merely one person killing over six million Jews, but rather how these events were breaking families in the process. The sad mood in the story opens the eyes of the reader to show them that anything can happen in the world, but families should always aim at sticking together.

The book shows the struggles that the Jews had to pass through in order to survive the deadly holocaust. Even though they went through all those hardships, throughout the process, they were never sure whether they would survive. They just depended on luck for survival (Spiegelman, 1991). As the father of the main character narrates his ordeals, one cannot help, but to notice that it took every bit of a man to stay alive and survive the war since the war was quite vicious and vigorous. He tells of his younger years and how he met his son’s mother and then comes the Holocaust, which took away their lives to the concentration camps and the presence of the Nazis.

Many families were separated and death was a common thing in those horrible days especially of the aged since this was the first step. They gassed the aged to death in the concentration camps. According to this book, those killed were any persons, Jewish or non-Jewish, displaces, persecuted or discriminated against due to racial, religious, ethnic, social or political policies presented by the Nazis. No one had a say in these brutal happenings and whoever tried to get in the way would be killed (Spiegelman, 1991).

As dire as the situation was, it was every man for himself, those who could get out and escape would survive if not, death was sure death for them. Hitler was aiming at dominating the world and he did not seem to mind what it took him to get there. He wanted a perfect race, blue-eyed, blonde, and German blood. His main target was to eliminate the Jews and all the other races that tried to stop him from eliminating them. The narrator takes the readers through all his experiences. He describes when he was in the army, and when he got caught and taken away to be beaten by the Nazis.

He also describes when they were turned into slaves for the Germans and had to sleep in tents even if it was freezing cold. People took risks and no one really knew what their end would be like. Of course, the Holocausts left people with scars both physically and psychologically (Helmwood, 2004). A perfect example is the author’s mother who after successfully getting away from the war takes her own life. Other characters in the book are full of guilt because they survived and others just like them did not survive.

The author himself suffered from depression. He is completely consumed by the happenings of that period of the terrible Holocaust. His father ends up to be a stingy man, a trait he learned as he tried to survive the war. The Nazis toyed with the Jews by torturing them for their own enjoyment before killing them. The Jews resulted in hiding in bunkers underground or in other people’s houses. Depicting them as mice with vermin that needs to be exterminated is a metaphor used in the book.

The Jews were inferior and were to be eaten by the Germans. As the Jews tried to disguise themselves as German, they are depicted as mice wearing cat masks. Half-breeds of the Jews and Germans had mice bodies, but cat stripes all along with them. These half-breeds still had to hide since they were not pure Germans. The Americans are drawn as dogs while the French as frogs. People’s social class and activities they were capable of doing also determined how they would be treated (Smith, 2012).

In conclusion, the story of Maus is more than just words on paper. It is the story of the trials and tribulations of the Holocaust. It creates a window for readers to see how one family can be haunted and completely changed by it. The Holocaust is a difficult concept, which cannot be fully represented. The book acknowledges this and decides to use the graphic novel format.