“MAUS”, a book written by Art Spigelman, is a story about survivors’ life in a Nazi concentration camp and aftermath. Vladek Spiegelman, the father of Art, is one of the lucky survivors of World War 2, but that war affects his future life so much that he and his whole family are destroyed by it. His body is free from the war, but his soul has already died, and his spirit is still imprisoned in the Auschwitz camp. Vladek can’t get rid of the terrible memories in the holocaust, he and his wife were always asking themselves, why did they survived, but others didn’t. This shadow in their hearts was with them until they died. Their second son, Art Spiegelman is a man who was born after the war and grow up in a broken family—with a grumpy father, a suicidal mother and a dead brother. He is also a sufferer of the war, but indirectly. The family is at the edge of crush, but people think that they are lucky, are they?

      Due to the persecution of the war, Vladek can’t adapt himself to the normal social life anymore, the extreme atrocity of humans makes him lost all his confidence. He became stingy and impudent—all day thinking about how to take advantages from others, even his wife. He pretend to be a pitiful person in order to receive compassion and care. He is highly distrustful of others, and feels like everyone around him is trying to steal money from him, including his family members. Vladek survived, but he is confused, he feels all those foolish prisoners replaced him to die, and he is the murderer.

      Anja, Vladek’s wife, committed suicide after survived from the WWI due to the loss of her son and intolerable with Vladek’s eccentricities. She is tired of suffering in the horrible memories so she choose to end her life and meet with her dear son Richieu. In the last panel of MAUS II, Vladek said to Art: “More I don’t need to tell you. We were both very happy, and lived happy happy ever after.” This is a total lie because both Anja and Vladek were insane from the second they got liberated. They were just trying to paralyzed themselves, pretending to be happy.

         Art Speigelman, the substitute for his elder brother—Richieu. The death of Richieu is certainly the heaviest blow to the Speigelman family: it’s the unacceptable truth that turned their lives upside down. And the death of Richieu is the shadow over Art’s childhood which indirectly shaped his personality. He feels pain when he saw Richieu’s photo in his parents’ bedroom, he feels that his dead bother gets even more love from parents than he does: he is just an inessential person in his family. Richieu died at the age of 6, the age of innocence. His time stopped, so he is always the perfect child in his parents’ eyes. But Art is not, he is the substitute, and he has to bear all these bad habits and temper of Vladek. At the last page of MAUS II, when Art finished recording the tape, he heard his father said: I’m tired from talking, Richieu, and it’s enough stories for now…” Vladek called him Richieu instead of Art, that’s because he always believed that Art is Richieu, and his first son didn’t die in Poland but grow up. Art finally admit that his father is still in the hell of Auschwitz, living like nightmare.

      MAUS is a story of the real “survivors” —Not only how the survivors survive from the war, but also how the descendants of the survivors survive form the shadow of the dark past. Spiegelman is trying to let everyone know that under the totalitarianism, you can either choose to die or destroy your life.