Pascal Croci
My brother has been insisting I read this book for ages. I finally picked it up and breezed through it, but don’t let that make it seem like the topic that something that should be glossed over. The graphic novel itself is pretty short, though the horrors inside are far from easily forgettable. This novel doesn’t shy away from the horrors of the Holocaust, and at the end, there is an interview provided by the author explaining a few more aspects of the work such as how he came to the story and which pieces of the story were from first-hand accounts told by survivors.
The graphic novels starts of with a terrible, graphic killing, which immediately reminded me that this was not a fantasy novel. Innocent, lovely people were going to die and evil wasn’t an easy person to find and hate. While reading, I felt like I was missing some vital information about the people I was seeing or sometimes, what was going on. Perhaps this is meant to mimic the way the outside world saw the horrors of Auschwitz, or the cloudiness still surrounding what happened, but I wanted it to be clear–to finally explain to the world what happened. Regardless, I still had to sit and think about what I had just read once I reached the end.
I’d like to see this book taught in high schools, though I’d warn parents about the graphic nature of the book’s contents before handing it to younger eyes. Now that I’ve read this, I’m interested in picking up a copy of Maus, which is mentioned often by the author.