Maus - Memory & History

In these scenes, Vladek is explaining what the gas chambers looked like and what it was like for people when they went into them. He says ‘ You HEARD about the gas, but I’m telling not rumors, but only what really I SAW”. He believes he is an eyewitness when he speaks about what it was like when Jews were gassed. But we know from his stories that what he knows about the gas chambers is what he has been told by others. This shows a conflict between what he actually witnessed versus what he was told but believes are his own memories.

It isn’t clear whether he believes the memories of what it was actually like for people going to the gas chambers to be of first hand experience, because he speaks as if they are but then says that someone else had shared the story with him. We know and Art knows that Vladek’s first hand experience with the gas chamber was seeing it for the first and only time as he was dismantling it for the German’s; which is why he draws images of Vladek working with the other POW and hearing the story that he speaks about as if he witnessed it first hand.

The scene that speaks about what the people believed the gas chamber was – a shower – is another area that makes me question his memory of this. It makes you think that these people had no idea what awaited them, but we know that the Jews in Auschwitz knew about the gas chambers and knew what was going to happen when they went to them.

Vladek’s recollection of this scene at this time seems to be because he wants to believe that the people didn’t know they were about to die so he didn’t feel such guilt. In other parts of the book, Vladek speaks about the gas chambers as if everyone knows what they are and that everyone wants to elongate the time they have before they are sent there. Vladek feels a lot of emotion in the gas chamber because he knows his father, sisters, brothers and so many more were ‘finished’ in a place like this and it haunts him.

This whole scene shows the struggle between the author’s portrayal of Vladek’s stories and the fine line between people’s memory and how they write history.