Quotes From Maus 2

How Maus II portrays humanity’s poor treatment of one another

Imagine being with your loving family in your cozy home, living your normal life, day by day. You close your eyes and the next thing you know, you're in an unknown, scary place. You don’t know where your beloved family is. Barbed wire surrounds the areas, unlike your traditional fence back at home. Everyone and everything you once had is lost, and soon you’ll go with them. You crowd into the small “shower” room with all the other people who are just like you, as your dictators prepare you to be sent to the skies in a cloud of thick black smoke. Maus II, written and illustrated by Art Spiegelman, encapsulates this feeling very well by telling his father's story about how he survived

The first quote will discuss the death marches. Once the Germans found out the Allies were getting close, they ordered death marches to kill off as many of the remaining Jews as they could. They forced the Jews to march to another camp farther within Germany. “All night I heard shooting. He who got tired, who can’t walk so fast, they shot. The more we walked, the more I heard shooting” (Spiegelman 82). This quote displays the theme because it is extremely inhumane to murder someone for being so malnourished and physically incapable, that they can’t walk a long distance. Especially if you're the reason that they are so weak and malnourished, which is the exact situation the Nazis were in, they were responsible for the condition of the prisoners. This next quote will talk about how strict they were at the camp. During Vladek’s time at Auschwitz, they would have roll calls to gather the prisoners together. They were very strict about things, and if you were slightly wrong, you were taken away. “On one appel he didn’t stand so straight and a guard dragged him away, I heard he pushed him down and jumped hard on his neck… or they sent him to the gas, I don't remember, but they finished him and he never anymore complained” (Spiegelman 50). This quote

The first quote will talk about when they first entered the camp, realizing how badly taken care of everything was. “All around was a smell so terrible, I can’t explain… sweetish… so like rubber burning. And fat” (Spiegelman 27). This quote shows just how badly the Nazis took care of the camp, as the smell indicated that the camp had obviously not been cleaned. This is very unsanitary and inhumane to the prisoners who had to live with all the filth of the camp. The next quote describes the sleeping arrangements. Sleeping in the camp was terrible. The barracks were too small to fit everyone, so they had to uncomfortably squeeze into the rows of beds, and some couldn’t even sleep on the beds because of how packed it was. “It was room hardly to move. Only to go down to the toilet was 15 minutes walking on the unlucky ones sleeping on the floor. And coming back I couldn’t find again where is my bed” (Spiegelman 30). This quote addresses the fact that the living conditions in the camp were terrible. They were forced into a small area with not enough beds to fit everyone, causing some people to sleep on the floor, which is very