broken
adjective
(of a person) having given up all
hope; despairing
pioneer
noun
a person who is among the first to explore or settle a new area
pioneer
noun
a person who is among the first to explore or settle a new area
It was not a simple matter, recovering
from her mother’s death. And Alex knew that.
She just didn’t know it would be so
hard.
Her therapist told her to draw
pictures, so Alex painted elaborate portraits of her mother laughing and humming
and twirling like she did before she died.
But it did no good.
It was as though she was wandering
through a dark, interminable tunnel, and Alex decided that she would crouch in
the shadows and not let anyone see that her hands were slipping.
The journey of recovery would be
long and grim.
What will the future bring me?
That’s the question hundreds of thousands of homeless
Jews asked after the collapse of the Third Reich. They had limited financial
resources and few surviving family members, and some of these survivors saw the
United States as the first step to a prosperous future. As a result, more than
80,000 Holocaust survivors immigrated to the United States between 1945 and
1952.
When studying the Holocaust, people
tend to focus on survivors’ lives in the ghettos and concentration camps. They
are most interested in stories on how survivors pulled themselves through the
Holocaust with their own wit and common sense, and how those same survivors
lived a wonderful life after the Holocaust. However, these people do not
realize that the Holocaust radically altered the Jews’ lifestyle and
environment, which in turn changed the way they viewed the world and regarded
others around them. These changes would sometimes follow the survivors
throughout their lives, even after the Holocaust.
The story of rebuilding is hard, and
sometimes it hurts.
Every day after her mother’s death, Alex came home to an
empty house. The kids at school gave her sympathetic looks, and her teachers
gave her A’s and B+’s even when she knew she deserved a C.
There used to be numerous pictures
of her mother, arranged on the mantle like birds on a telephone wire.
But her father burned them.
One morning Alex had woken up to the
wispy smell of smoke that is known to fill a space the same way emptiness fills
a melancholy house. She groggily walked down the stairs to find her father
kneeling in front of the fireplace, slowly burning her mother’s pictures one by
one.
He said that doing that made it
easier to forget.
When writing Maus, Art
Spiegelman had asked his father, Vladek, about the location of his mother’s personal
journals. His mother, Anja, had committed suicide years before, and Art was
unable to ask her directly about her Holocaust experience. Her journals were
his only hope of finding out her story.
Vladek simply told him, “These
notebooks, and other really nice things of mother…one time I had a very bad
day…and all of these things I destroyed.”
Art, in a sudden state of shock,
retorted, “God damn you! You–you murderer! How the hell could you do such a
thing?”
By destroying Anja’s journals,
Vladek had demolished her memories, and thus she had died another death.
Alex remembered how, when she was younger, her father would
let her sit on his shoulders and he would show her the constellations traced in
the night sky.
Now she and her father were distant.
There was tension between them; both felt it was their fault that Alex’s mother
had died, and each of them wanted to apologize to the other for the part played
in Alex’s mother’s death.
Art had an unpleasant childhood. He was continually compared to his
brother, Richieu, who had died in the Holocaust and whom Art had never met. A
photo of his brother hung in an honored place in the Spiegelman household. As
Art said, “The photo never threw tantrums or got in any kind of trouble…it was
an ideal kid, and I was a pain in the
ass. I couldn’t compete.”
Since Art was so unable to relate to
his father because of Vladek’s rare Holocaust experience, he and Vladek had an
estranged relationship. When complaining to his wife, Françoise, about the
matter, he said “I know this is insane, but I somehow wish I had been in
Auschwitz with my parents so I could
really know what they lived through...I guess it’s some kind of guilt about having an easier life than they did.”
This problem was reflected in the
writing of his graphic novel, Maus.
“I mean, I can’t even make any sense out of my relationship with my father,”
said Art. “How am I supposed to make sense out of Auschwitz?...of the
Holocaust?”
No one cooked dinner in the house anymore. Alex’s father
ordered pizza every night from the local pizza shop.
Two months after her mother’s death,
Alex figured out something profound. She realized that she and her father were
at opposite ends of the dark tunnel, and neither of them had a flashlight.
Alex had never explored the realms
of death before, but she was figuring it out. She and her father talked more
often, and they would make dinner at home some nights. She smiled a little more
often, and she was slowly becoming certain that life was starting to settle
down.
To survive the Holocaust, Vladek had been practical and resourceful. Even
after World War II, Vladek would live the life of a miser despite his
successful retirement and the large amount of money he had in the bank. Vladek
stated in Maus that “Ever since
Hitler I don’t like to throw out even a crumb.”
One scene in the book depicts Vladek
picking up wire from a trashcan to ‘save for later’. Art, embarrassed, shouts
“You always pick up trash! Can’t you
just buy wire?”
Art would often
question Vladek's habits and the unusual experiences he'd had with his father,
from the burning of Anja's journals to Vladek's obsessive hoarding. Art
realized that the horrors Vladek had seen and experienced would stay with his
father until the end.
After all, the story of rebuilding is hard and painful.
Sometimes Alex felt ancient, a thousand
years older than she actually was. Sometimes Alex wished she could go back to
when her mother was alive, when she was young and she felt young, too. Her
mother’s death would follow her for a long time, but that was okay.
Life was looking up.
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