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''Maus: A Survivor's Tale'' is a memoir presented as a Graphic Novel by Art Spiegelman . It recounts Spiegelman's father's struggle to survive the Holocaust as a Polish Jew and draws largely on his father's recollections of events he personally experienced. The book also follows the author's troubled relationship with his father and the way the effects of war reverberate through generations of a family. In 1992 it won a Pulitzer Prize Special Award , the '' New York Times '' asserting "The Pulitzer board members ... found the cartoonist's depiction of Nazi Germany hard to classify." OVERVIEW The book alternates the stories told by Spiegelman's father Vladek Spiegelman , about life in Poland before the Second World War (in Radomsko , Czestochowa , Sosnowiec and Bielsko ), and during the war (as a war prisoner near Nuremberg , in Lublin , Sosnowiec again, the nearby Srodula . Auschwitz as prisoner 175113, Gross Rosen , Dachau ), with the contemporary life of Art, Vladek and their surroundings in Rego Park , NY and Florida. Through the book, Spiegelman shows how his father in spite of his experience still shows Racial Prejudice against Blacks , or how he is extremely stingy and makes life very difficult for those around him, such as his second wife Mala (after the suicide of Art's mother Anja), also a KZ survivor. THEMES Obviously, the Holocaust is the major theme, although perhaps it would be most precise to say that the effort to articulate the Holocaust is the major theme, giving the book a metabiographical aspect. Spiegelman expresses the apprehension he feels about trying to express the unexpressable at a few points in the second part. The major theme is not only a survivor's point of view of the Holocaust, but the point of view of those who did not live it, but are still deeply connected to it. The choice to use animals to represent races and nationalities itself is questioned; Spiegelman at this point begins drawing characters as humans wearing animal Mask s and to show Vladek as he is, even the bad, can be seen as part of this struggle. PUBLICATION ''Maus'' was originally published as a three page strip Spiegelman submitted in 1971 to edition also exists, although it is no longer in print. EDITIONS
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