It’s drawn in a simple childlike way: Jews appear as mice, Nazis as cats, Poles as pigs. It’s a question that remains unsettled and unsettling.Ī large part of the appeal of Maus is its accessibility, a quality that appears, like the clear prose of Levi, to be an ethical decision. Any glimpse then of a system of atrocities arguably incomprehensible in scale and horror is both crucial and incomplete. By contrast, the dark enigmatic poetry of Paul Celan defies rationality as if to suggest a crime as colossal as the Holocaust, containing millions of stories, many lost forever, cannot and perhaps should not be ‘understood’. Those who have, and who have seen the face of the Gorgon, did not return, or returned wordless,’ he wrote in 1986’s The Drowned and the Saved. The clarity and integrity of Primo Levi’s writing, for instance, is haunted by survivor’s guilt, ‘We are those who, through prevarication, skill or luck, never touched bottom. The question of how to begin to comprehend the vast depths of the Holocaust is a fraught one that survivors, seeking to bear witness, have long wrestled with.
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