When I was in eighth grade, our English teacher had us watch Escape From Sobibor. Sobibor was a Nazi extermination camp in Poland that housed Russian POWs as well as Jews, Romanis, and others who the Third Reich deemed “undesirable.” To this day, I have no idea why our teacher had us watch this. It seems reasonable that it would have been an introduction to the Holocaust as a precursor to reading The Diary of Anne Frank, but it wasn’t, and we didn’t read it. What I do know is that it was my first exposure to the horrors that were the Holocaust and that led me to learning about this period of history, ultimately focusing on the psychological factors that would lead one seriously psychologically fucked up (not an actual diagnosis) dude to, in turn, convince millions of people that one people group was evil because they didn’t look like everyone else.
(*Side note*–In more recent studies on race in America, I’ve learned that the anti-Black laws of the Jim Crow era were considered to be “too extreme” by Nazi standards. Yes, the Nazis in the ’30s looked to America for guidance on how to oppress racial minorities but rejected some of what we were doing because it was too much.)
When Maus hit the news as the latest on the banned book list, I had to investigate this. I also resolved to read it, no matter what. Why? Because reading books outside of my usual preferences of genres and authors stretches my mind. Also, if someone is finding a book offensive enough to want to remove it from age-appropriate curricula, then I’m curious about what’s so bad about it.
Maus tells the story of the author’s parents’ experiences living as Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland. The story bounces between the modern day as Artie, the author–Art Spiegelman–talks to his father and also deals with the frustrations of their relationship; and the past as Vladek tells his story and shares his memories with his son. The book is a graphic novel with Jews portrayed as mice, Nazis as cats, and Polish citizens as pigs. Y’all, I’d never read a graphic novel in my life before this one (stepping outside my preferred genre). The anthropomorphisms soften but don’t negate the impact of the story.
I don’t want to give spoilers, but it made me feel. Spiegelman conveys the hope, fear, uncertainty, and sadness his parents experienced as they tried to avoid arrest. His frustration with his aging father also comes through the pages as he grapples with the disparity in the situations between his own upbringing in modern day New York (well, modern in the mid 1980s) and his father’s life back in Poland in the ’30s and ’40s. This frustration comes to a head at the end of the book which left me angry and sad for Vladek, though I could also empathize with Artie’s frustrations over this emotional disconnect between father and son.
As the McMinn County, Tennessee, school board pointed out, there is partial nudity and profanity in the book, and given its subject matter, there are also several incidents of violence. Nothing in this book, however, can compare with watching dozens of nude women and children being gassed to death in a Sobibor gas chamber, nor can it compare with the portrayal of an SS soldier coldly shooting a Jewish mother and her newborn infant, also in Escape From Sobibor. If books and movies lead us to pursue their subject matters–especially history–and that pursuit of knowledge further leads us to learn things like white supremacy is evil and how propaganda works, then there is no explicit threat in these materials. The only reason people have problems with teenagers learning about the people who were the targets of pogroms of genocide aimed at exterminating an entire race of people is, those teenagers might learn how to be more empathetic towards people not like them–or their parents. And echoing what many have said, eighth graders see worse on TV, video games, on social media, and on the internet.
