5 - Maus Page Analysis

In page 122 of Maus: And Here the Troubles Begin, the page beings with a snippet of and airplane blocking out the sun, followed by Arties arrival in Florida to see his father. One big observation that is pulled out of this page is that the sun in the first panel is also a spotlight, similar to the cover of the first edition of the book, as well as that, the sun could be a Nazi flag, but with the swastika covered by the airplane prominently pictured. The image is another hint of the scars that Vladek carries with him after the war, and that what the Nazi’s have done to his family is irreversible, even after all the years in America and being in Florida in the hospital.  

The page also has many hints of smoke imagery embedded within the panels, such as when the smoke from Art’s cigarette creates a divide between him and Mala, as Art cannot fully relate to Vladek’s troubles, while Mala herself is a survivor of the Holocaust, the smoke being simultaneously the smoke of lost families and Jews, a generational barrier between Holocaust survivors and their children. Vladek is depicted in an oxygen mask, as well, symbolizing his weakness against the secondhand smoke that Artie produces as he needs oxygen to sustain himself after all his physical and mental trauma. This all ties into the theme of trauma and how it can never go away, especially in such an event as the holocaust, something that can never be imagined to be as horrible as it really was, the destruction of peoples that occurred being something humanity has never seen done in such a systematic matter. The symbols of the long-gone Nazi’s appear in both the past and the present, even into Art’s life, as he feels that the Holocaust is also carried on him by his father, and how his life is molded by something that he has never seen.