As Vast as the Ocean

       When I saw the cover of Maus, I was immediately taken back to elementary school. I remember being at the Scholastic book fair and being confused by the cover of a particular book. It was obvious the girl was trapped, and there was a symbol surrounding her, but what did it mean? After reading, and rereading, and rereading again, I was captivated by Lida’s fight to survive in “Making Bombs for Hitler” by Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch. Lida, a ten-year-old Ukrainian girl, was taken away from her little sister to a slave labor camp in Germany. There, when forced to make bombs with some other girls, she and the others came up with the creative plan to use dirt instead of gunpowder in the bombs they made, writing letters of hope and putting them inside. This act of defiance could’ve costed their lives, but when the only certain thing in their lives was death, they were willing to risk it all to prove something. (My personal beat-up copy)      This story sou...

  ->  Mischief and Plague are some official names for a community of rats.   Spiegelman is making an argument through this seemingly ‘nonsense’ advice Vladek gives Artie to explain the ruin of community for Jews. One of the reasons Spiegelman uses rats to represent Jewish people is because of the name of a community of rats: it can be called a  mischief , meaning trouble, but it can also be called a  plague , which is a disease. People always want to get rid of diseases to keep the world a clean, good place to live. To use the term  plague  to describe Jewish people reflects the Nazis views of Jews during WWII, when they did what they thought was “cleaning” and committed one of the largest genocides in history. While communities of Jews were viewed as a plague by the Nazis, community helped many Jews survive the war. However, this bit of strength was what inspired the Nazis to use isolation as another form of torture against them later on, since all...