Mischief Does NOT Equal Plague

 -> 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 they really had was each other. When the Nazis tore even formed families apart, all hope was lost. Spiegelman uses Vladek to demonstrate this significance when he later passes on this knowledge of community to his son. Artie doesn’t understand his advice in the prologue when Vladek says, “If you lock them in a room together with no food for a week…. then you could see what it is, friends!” (6). What could have inspired this? What kind of friendship requires being locked together in a room? Well, it wasn’t the friendships, but the circumstances. Vladek says friends sarcastically when talking to Artie, as friendship is opposite of what he was experiencing at that moment when his friends left him, just as it was the opposite of what went down in the bunker all those years ago during the war. When nearly their entire ghetto was gone, Vladek, Anja, and a few others were hiding in a bunker. The only reason those in the bunker had gotten so far into the war was because of each other. In their own way, that bunker formed a community, a support system. It was corrupted, however, since a lot of people had to pay each other for help with all they had left to get so far. This shows how the war had ruined any sense of community because instead of helping each other selflessly, the Jews’ only goal was surviving. It wasn’t a community, but each family for themselves. The war had changed where all their loyalties lay, an essential part of a relationship. No one can eat the riches they bribed each other with, however, and when they were all stuck starving at the bottom of the bunker for a week, with Vladek telling Anja to “chew on this,” it wasn’t food, but since “never any of [them] had been so hungry like then, It’s only wood. But chewing it feels a little like eating food” (123). The only reason they had survived was each other: to cope with, to rely on, and to hopefully make it out of the war with. So back to the present, when Vladek is in the garage sawing something and Artie tells him how “[He] fell, and [his] friends skated away without [him]” (6), the wood triggered his memory back to when all that was left of his community was Anja, and all they had left was wood and time. 

“Maus” by Art Spiegelman, page 6

****DON'T read Maus at Panera****