The mice drawn so beguilingly in Maus II are actually representations of Art Spiegelman’s parents who were captured and  incarcerated in Auschwitz in 1944. All the Jewish people are graphically depicted as mice, the Polish as pigs, and the Germans as cats. It IS a graphic novel after all.

Mauschwitz is the title of  chapter one, showing a picture of a tattooed mouse inside a barbed wire fence  with a gun tower behind him. The tower has an armed guard on top with a gun meant to discourage any escape attempts. Inside Mauschwitz, Vladek sees evidence of violence or hears about it from a victim: CRAk marks the sound of prisoner struck with a wooden shoe after asking for a pair of shoes to fit him(26); Mandelbaum reports being beaten for asking for more soup (29); a Kapo, a Polish supervisor, hits another prisoner with a stick for being too slow at obeying his commands (30) ; Vladek is beaten when he is caught carrying food to Anja (57); and Anja is kicked by a bad Kapo (63). Some frames Spiegelman draws are scenes Vladek thinks might have happened: an old guy is pushed down by a guard and then is stepped on to break his neck (5o); Mandelbaum, in the act of pursuing his cap, which was knocked off his head by the guard, is shot for trying to escape (35).

But it’s the foreshadowing of violence, one scene being repeatedly shown to elicit a horrified anticipation of the violence against the helpless prisoners, because it is all so carefully planned- on a massive scale. About the time Abraham disappears near the beginning of chapter one, there is the “sweetish” smell of burning fat and rubber, and then smoke is seen coming out of the chimney (27). The picture at the beginning of chapter two shows the wide-open mouths of mice screaming in pain with lightning bolts around them, and then at the bottom of the next page, a large heap of mouse skeletons (41). The smoking chimney is shown again in frames on pages 55 and 58, and then on page 69, there is the waiting chimney without smoke. When Vladek goes as a workman to Crematorium II, he sees the undergound undressing room, the underground gas chamber, and the ovens where the bodies were burned, and he says “To SUCH a place finished my father, my sisters, by brothers, so many” (71). But some Hungarians were not lucky enough to go to the gas chambers and ovens, but were simply pushed into open graves, Vladek is told. Other prisoners poured gasoline over them, “and the fat from the burning bodies they scooped and poured again so everyone could burn better” (72). The mice with open mouths  screaming in pain were those Hungarian victims and the lightning around them was the flames. The skeletons remain.