Maus 2: And Here My Troubles Began By Art Spiegelman

In Maus 2: And Here My Troubles Began by Art Speigelman, the author concludes the tale of his father , Vladek Spiegelman's, survival of the Holocaust.  This sequel starts off where the first book left off at Auschwitz 1.  The theme that the author is trying to convey through the book is that the Holocaust was a horrible atrocity and it should be known about.


The author conveys his theme in the form of a comic book.  I think that the reason that he did this, is because comic book's were never used to tell serious stories at that time.  Doing so got the book more attention and allowed him to use his skills as an artist.  I think that another reason that he decided to use a comic book to convey his theme is that since he was able to use pictures it allowed him to more vividly show how horrible the Holocaust was.  It provides the reader with a much better understanding of how horrible the Holocaust was.  His pictures were very well done and they portrayed mood very well.  Seeing a picture of 4 people being hanged in the center of the Jewish ghetto is was so much more powerful than any picture that a normal author could have "painted" in the my mind with words.


Overall, the theme of this book is that the Holocaust was a horrible atrocity and people need to know the tale of one of its survivors.  The survivor that he wrote about was his dad.  He conveyed his theme using the good old saying "a picture is worth a thousand words".  I think that Art's theme is true about all of the world's horrible atrocities and mistakes so we don't repeat the horrible things that mankind has done such as mass homicides, slavery, etc.