The Face of a MAUS

On page 26 of volume 2 in the comic book, MAUS, Spiegelman exposes the treatment that Art's father had to face after being captured by the Germans and brought to a Nazi camp using his illustrations.You can see that, although it is snowing outside, the Jews are still being forced to run naked and remain barefoot. In the second panel you can see that the Jew is hopping from foot to foot in an attempt to keep his feet from the cold ground. These cases are used to show the unfair treatment towards the Jewish people. The fact that the mice were forced to strip out of all their own clothing displays the German's efforts to take away each prisoner's identity, leaving them as nothing but a clone of the guy beside him. Another point of degrading conduct is, "They never even looked on what size they threw." The Nazi's handed out prisoner clothing without a concern over fit and comfort which further highlights one of Spiegleman's ideas that, during the Holocaust, Jews were all treated as the same lesser beings and that they did not have rights to personal needs. In addition, with the clothes on, the author draws attention to uniformity among the prisoner, expressing the underlying message that the title of "Jews" labeled all people of a certain physical appearance. All of those under such a title were stripped of a personal identity. The outfits also create a greater contrast between the higher status cats/Germans, and the low-level mice/Jews and pigs/Polish, another factor that contributed to the discriminating behavior at the time. Looking closely, the cats wear thick, and professional looking jackets that are fitted at the waist, while on the other hand, the Nazi prisoners are given loose-fitting, thin shirts and pants.