SPIEGELMAN: Not especially, although when I was growing up, my mother was more voluble than my father on the subject. GROSS: When you approached your father and sat him down and said, you know, tell me chronologically all the details you can remember from the war and from surviving the Nazis, was it hard for him to talk about it? Any older kid that I was having trouble with would immediately have a swastika on his arm, you know. SPIEGELMAN: I think I've probably had many, you know. GROSS: You didn't have dreams where you were chased by Nazis. And although I don't remember all of them, I remember one fantasy that was recurrent was being in school and then the principal, instead of just telling everybody good morning on the PA system, would tell all the Jewish students to go out to the school yard, you know, that kind of thing. So I remember having dreams about him, although I never met him or knew much about him beyond a couple of anecdotes and that photograph. It was a photograph that was originally just maybe two inches by two inches, but it was a large portrait photograph of what would have been my brother if he had survived the war. SPIEGELMAN: Yeah, I - see, one thing - I guess one thing that haunted me when I was growing up was this one blown-up photograph. GROSS: Did you have Nazi dreams when you were growing up? And it was only when I got some other perspective when I went away to college and was surrounded by people who didn't have those ghosts hovering over them that I realized there was something unusual about growing up with parents who survived a form of hell. What would happen is these stories, which really haunted me, I didn't know were haunting me because they were what I was breathing. SPIEGELMAN: Yeah, that was something I didn't know until I left home. GROSS: I got the impression that you were frequently taught grim lessons about life based on your parents' experiences during the Holocaust. And the anecdote would just glimmer in and out between talking about taking out the garbage or doing homework. SPIEGELMAN: Oh, yeah, but the same way that some other person my age's parents might have told them about life in the Depression, you know? Oh, it was really hard back then. GROSS: But before you sat down and actually said to your father, tell me the story of how you survived, had he actually told you anecdotes about his survival during the war? And on the other hand, a lot of their friends and therefore their friends' children were also involved in the same background. So it was built into the fabric of our life without it being a specifically pointed one. Why do you have a number on your arm? And she would say it was a phone number she didn't want to forget or something like that. Spiegelman, why do you have a number tattooed on your - well, not tattooed. So that when I was a little kid, my mother had a tattooed number, and every once in a while, friends of mine would ask, Mrs. It was just one more thing that I knew about my parents. SPIEGELMAN: Well, I can't remember not knowing it, but on the other hand, I can't remember it ever being a significant fact. TERRY GROSS, BYLINE: When did you first become aware that your parents were survivors? You have to do a lot more work to decode a comic strip than you do in understanding a film or even reading a book. And on the other hand, they're a very, very abstract medium. Like, just too - it's an oxymoron somewhere in there, and people just don't want to hear any more after that.īut it seems to me that comics are, on the one hand, a very direct medium. Here's Art Spiegelman talking to Terry Gross.ĪRT SPIEGELMAN: People are usually very upset when they first hear that I've done a comic strip about the Holocaust.
The book has moving flashback sequences as his father describes passing as a Gentile, hiding out in bunkers, and facing death in a concentration camp. He has a difficult relationship with his father, and he hopes these conversations will bring them closer. He coaxes his father to remember the war years and let him record his stories on tape. It shows Spiegelman in his father's house in Queens, N.Y. The comic is like a documentary about the making of the book. The book tells the story of how his Jewish parents survived the Holocaust in Poland. He said he found the mouse metaphor appropriate to Hitler's rhetoric of extermination and his references to Jews as vermin.
In "Maus," Spiegelman draws the Jews as mice and the Nazis as cats. We thought we'd listen back to Terry's 1987 interview with Spiegelman in which he talks about drawing and writing that book. Last month, a Tennessee school district banned the book "Maus," the 1986 Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel about the Holocaust by Art Spiegelman.
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