Maus I and II by Art Spiegelman - Essay Example

It can equally serve as a means of exploring irreversible psychological changes in a personality of a man who went through Nazi concentration camps. Vladek, the protagonist of the book, is deeply affected by the horrors of the Nazi treatment of the Jews. He develops a bunch of new character traits as a result of numerous psychological traumas. Having survived physically, Vladek seems to have lost his personality in the concentration camps of Auschwitz and Dachau, having grown into an alienated and psychologically disturbed old man.

This is well illustrated by his son’s words that “in some ways [his father] didn‘t survive” (Spiegelman 90). The Holocaust has made him incapable of building adequate relationship with his nearest and dearest and he both rejects them (as in case with Mala) and forces them into his own reality full of horror, guilt inducing, stinginess, and fear (as in case with his son Artie and his second wife Mala). The historical background to Vladek’s dramatic psychological change was his victimization by the Nazi regime through the Holocaust.

The term Holocaust is used to refer to mass destruction of the Jewish people in Europe with the aim of their complete annihilation by the Nazis. The latter killed approximately 6 million Jews in the period from 1933 to 1945 (Miller 39). Millions of Jewish people were murdered in concentration camps, i.e. camps where the perceived enemies of the Nazi state were kept. Initially, those were Nazi’s political opponents, but in 1938 Jews’ round-up started. Dachau and Auschwitz, the concentration camps that Vladek went through, ran mass extermination programs.

In Dachau, up to 32, 000 registered deaths took place with the unknown number of the non-registered (Miller 38). In Auschwitz up to 1.5 million people of Jewish origin were murdered, plus 100, 000 people from other ethnic groups. Auschwitz, also known as Oswiecim, became a mass extermination camp in 1942. In its gas chambers, as many as 6, 000 people a day were killed (Miller 37). Only 7, 650 people were found alive in 1945 when the camp was liberated. It is hard to imagine a person who would retain healthy psychological condition having gone through the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps.

Apart from being starved and exploited as slaves, victims of the Nazi faced thousands of deaths every day. While all the time these people lived in fear of being gassed or shot to death, they also had to work in crematoriums where they were involved in burning corpses of thousands of men, women, and children who had been previously gassed (Miller 38). Survivor of Auschwitz, where more than one third of all Jewish people deaths took place, Vladek could not stay unaffected by the horrors he went through.

Judging by his behavior and haunted psychological condition, he suffered from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, a mental dysfunction which prevents people from living normal lives and building normal relationship within the family. So the psychological traits Vladek developed because of the Nazi imprisonment could have been a direct result of PTSD. Some of his traits emerged as a natural response to being placed in life-threatening conditions. In the novel, these traits negatively affect Vladek’s relationships with the members of his family, as well as prevent him from thinking and acting normal way.

Once a manager of his own textile