Maus Reading Chapters 1-3

In Chapter 1, Artie talks to his father explaining to him that he would like to make a book about his father's experiences, and sufferings, during the Holocaust. Artie's father begins to talk about his relationship with a woman, Lucia, and how he felt that she was not the right one for him. He then begins to tell the story of how he met Anna, Artie's mother, and his tough, long break- up with Lucia. Anna comes from a very wealthy family, however, she is not as pretty as Lucia. Vladek explains his reasoning of why he chose Anna over Lucia, and some of those reasons were because of her sensitivity and how smart she was. They get engaged, and marry, and he moves to her town to live. This chapter to me, showed how normal society was before the Holocaust and Nazi Germany had set in, and taken over. Everyone had dreams, and goals, that they were accomplishing. One of those dreams was Vladek opening and running a textile factory, in which he did.

In Chapter 2, Anna becomes depressed and both, Vladek and Anna, leave their newborn son to stay with Anna's parents, and go to a center for Anna to recover. Vladek had also left his factory under the supervision of his father-in-law, since he was the one that had given him the money to build and start it. On their way to the center, they begin to notice signs, and chants from civilians of different towns and cities, that were kicking Jews out. Three months later, not really knowing what has gone on in the real world, Anna recovers, and they return back home only to find that Vladek's textile factory had been robbed. With the help of Anna's father, he again gives him money, and the factory was rebuilt and finally going very well. News comes of a war starting, and Vladek gets a letter to go to the Polish reserves. He packs Anna and his son's things in a cart, and they depart their ways, Anna and their son going to safety, and Vladek turning and falling in line with the other troops.

In Chapter 3, Vladek goes into the army and has been given the task to start shooting one morning, at the Nazi's that were across the river. He does not feel that this is the right thing to do, but does as he is told. It is a Nazi victory, and Vladek is caught by them and taken as prisoner. He is given the task to go and round up all of the corpses, along with the other prisoners. They put him in a tent to stay in outside, and he is served only one meal a day of just a little bread and soup, and all of the prisoners freeze to death. Vladek finally takes advantage of an offering that is posted, and it is an offer to work, but they will be able sleep in warm cabins, and get plenty of food. After working there for a couple weeks, Vladek escapes and convinces a Polish conductor of the train, that he too is Polish, and that he would like to get across the border so that he can go home to see his family. He finally returns home, and surprises Anna and his son, them having no clue that he was on his way back.

Zelizer Reading

This reading mainly had to do with the photographs of the Nazi atrocity during the Holocaust. Images helped record the horror in memory after it's concrete signs had disappeared. The pictures became quickly available to newspaper and the rest of the public, and most were the same pictures, just taken at different angles. The photographs had different practives of composition such as, placement, numbers, and gaze. The pictures would capture the results of suffering (death, pain, starvation, etc.), but never the suffering itself.

Placement had to do with the decision of where to palce the evidence of the torture, suffering, and death, which created a layering between the photo's foreground and background. This layering communicated what was supposed to be depcited: survivors, civilians, corpses, etc. However, pictures from this time usually meant pictures of corpses, and they often alternated with witnesses in either the foreground or background. In most pictures, civilians and witnesses were placed in the foreground to try and distract the viewer from noticing the dead corpses in the background.

Numbers were also an enormous detail to the photographs taken. Many and most pictures entailed mass graves, where bodies had just been dumped together, and soon became almost impossible to discifer which body parts belonged to whom. Group images, with a lot more people, tended to be less offensive and graphic, than those of just people alone, being tortured and killed by themselves. This was partly because the people did not want those individuals to have the chance of being identified.

The last practice of these images was gaze, the look of those being depicted. The gaze of the near-dead survivors, whose eyes seemed so glazed over that they did not even realize, nor comprehend, what was going on in front of them. The survivors in these pictures were normally shot from the front, so that they would look like they actually were looking at the camera. However, in sense, these tortured survivors appeared to see without seeing.

RR to Stackelberg

In response to Stackelberg, the thing that took me by surprise was how much I really did not know about the Holocaust. From what I knew, people had always emphasized Hitler and the mass-killings of innocent people. I never realized that there were so many laws issued that, in the beginning, had given many people hope that they would end the random, fitful, extra-legal violence, and provide safety and order. There was a point in the history of these acts and laws, that condemned Jews to a type of "social death."
This reminded me, in a way, to the segregation of white and colored in our country some years ago. Obviously it was to a much much smaller extent, but in ways of signs saying, "Jews are not wanted here," it is the same. The Aryan race and decent became everything, and before the final solution (the killing of all European Jews), the aim was to just immigrate Jews out of Germany into other countries. Something I also had not known was that the mass persecution of people went a lot further that only Jews. It affected Gypsies, the mentally and physically disabled, homosexuals, pacifists, and political opponents.
One thing that really bothered me was how much the German public did know about what was going on and being done to these people. Secrecy and falsehood were some of the main goals of the whole operation, even though the killings were mere miles from their own homes. The camps, torturing, and liquidation were impossible to conceal from the public eye. The fact that events were written in newspapers, and publicized in speeches, and "free" citizens still did nothing about it, makes me disappointed. It makes me disappointed in that, these events could have been stopped from even making it into our history books today.