The Devil Doesn't Discriminate

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We've been reading Maus and in this graphic novel, page 95 in volume II spoke to me. The bottom panel depicts lots of dead bodies. Above the pile of bodies, you can see another person walking over these bodies.

In this panel, Spiegelman include a wide variety of races in the bodies: Jews, Poles, and Germans. I believe the purpose of including this is that these concentration camps were living hell for everyone in them, not just the Jews. Typhus didn't discriminate whether you were a Jew or not; it affected everyone. The juxtaposition of the bodies and the bathroom show how many people were affected by this, and couldn't do the simple task of going to the bathroom.

Also, the person walking over the bodies shows that in times like these, the dead didn't get much respect. It was everyone for themselves, and if it meant disgracing the dead, so be it. This also creates a foreboding sense that dropping dead on the spot can happen to anyone. All these people survived for so long in the camps, only to be killed by Typhus, and then promptly have their bodies disgraced.

Comments

  1. Matthew ChenOctober 6, 2019 at 12:52 PM

    Nice job Varun. The panels that you picked really do reflect how terrible the camps were for not just the Jews but also every race that got involved in the war and also how the dead people were not honored by the rest. Instead they served as a way for others to survive.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Adia LeeOctober 6, 2019 at 1:49 PM

    I like how you pointed out there were others than just Jews lying dead on the floor of the bathroom. I feel like it shows that they kind of became equal in suffering from the same disease and then being stepped on by the living no matter what ethnicity they were.

    ReplyDelete

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