Artie Spiegelman 's graphic novel Maus has greater teaching value when teaching high school students about the Holocaust than Elie Wiesel 's novel Night. Spiegelman 's Maus is better suited for teaching high school students about the events of the Holocaust due to how it is able to show what desperate measures the Jews would go to not to be brought away by the Nazis, its depiction of how the Holocaust affects survivors, and how it is able to show the horrid acts of the Holocaust in a visual manner.
Maus is able to both tell and show the horrors of the Holocaust Both Wiesel’s Night and Spiegelman’s Maus depict similar horrors of the Holocaust; however, due to Spiegelman 's Maus being a graphic novel, it is able to not only tell the
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Night, on the other hand, shows how some Jewish communities, due to the circumstance of their situation, would follow them to the death camps like sheep going to the slaughter. In Maus, when the Nazis decided to "finish out" the ghetto of Zawiercie, Tosha decides to take matters into her own hand: "Always Tosha carried around her neck some poison...she killed not only herself but also the three children". (Spiegelman 109) When reading this passage, high school students are able to understand the dire situation which is presented to Tosha: go with the Nazis and get gassed in the chambers, or take her life and the life of the children under her care. The question of going to a death camp or taking your own life is one that wouldn 't even cross the mind of any high school student, and by asking that question, students would wonder, "what would I do in that situation?" By making students think about what choices they would have made, Maus would help students relate to the Jews . In contrast to Maus, Night shows how some Jews happily went along with the Nazis. When leaving the ghetto in Night, the Jews respond with " joy, yes, joy. People must have thought there could be no greater torment in God 's hell than that of being stranded here". (Wiesel 16) The Jews of the Sighet ghetto didn 't resort to extreme measures like the ones in Zawiercie, but instead, joyfully went with the Nazis to the death camps. This is due to the Jews in Sighet, Transylvania not knowing the truth of the situation like we know about it today. High school students would most likely be aware of the location where the Jews would be taken to, Auschwitz. Because of this, students wouldn 't understand why the Jews of Sighet would be so happy to go to their deaths. Night would then