As a child, many of the stories we read and watch are ones represented by different animals. In Max and Ruby they are sibling bunnies living near their grandmother, Stuart in Stuart Little is a young mouse adopted into a new family and Peppa and her family are all pigs. its slightly less common, as you get older, to find these same tactics put to use in describing such serious events as the holocaust. However,  American cartoonist Art Spiegelman does just this in his graphic novel Maus. He portrays in his work, the persecuted Jewish as mice, The German’s as the cats, and the Polish as pigs. This begs the question, why cats and mice, and pigs?

Throughout the holocaust, the jewish people were always  represented as being vermin and at times not human through anti-sematic propoganda put forth by Germans. From the German perspective they were considered rats against the Arian nation that Hitler attempted to construct. It seems that by portraying them as mice, Spieglman has changed that representation from being something vile that no one would go near, to a small, generally sweeter version. Mice’s long tails are very noticeable much like the common stereotype of Jewish people with big noses. This further lends itself to the dynamic of the game of cat and mouse. In this metaphor, the German’s are seen as predatory, hunting down their prey, the mice, encircling it and then finishing it off. This sounding coincidentally like the germans steps to eradicate the Jews. Firstly making them wear the star on their arms to identify and watch them. Then moving them to ghettos where they were kept before being sent to camps where they did not return from. The use of pigs to describe the Poles was clever, as a pig would not typically be thought of as part of the same food chain as the cat and mouse. However, the stereotypes of pigs being somewhat grotesque and overall vile does show through in his graphic novel and is helpful in showing the poles ill tempers and unwillingness to help.

Overall, Spieglman’s use of the cat, mouse and pig to describe the three main character groups within his graphic novel. One of the most interesting features about this is that, for the most part, all the mice, cats, and pigs look the same as each other. This goes to show that Spieglman might be implying a common them that many jewish people faced. What happened was universal and not specific to few people.