Tonight I gave Art Spiegelman the National Book Awards Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. And we’re both being banned. Some of you may think this is a good thing because you don’t like my books or you don’t care for Maus. But I guarantee that there are books you love on the banned lists too. That’s why libraries and librarians fight for their rights to have all the books on the shelves and for your rights to read them. And it’s why I support them.
Here’s a link to an article about the current bannings in Texas. You may want to read it. And then think about getting onto your local school board, wherever you are, to prevent this from happening in your part of the world.
One day before Holocaust Memorial Day. From the article: (it no longer loads for me so that will lead you to the archived version)
The Vote was 10-0, with Yes votes from: Denise Cunningham, Bill Irvin, Quinten Howard, Sharon Brown, Mike Cochran, Mike Lowry, Donna Casteel, Jonathan Pierce, Tony Allman, Rob Shamblin.
[…]
Tony Allman, School Board Member: “Why does the educational system promote this kind of stuff, it is not wise or healthy… I am not denying it was horrible, brutal, and cruel. It’s like when you’re watching tv and a cuss word or nude scene comes on it would be the same movie without it. Well, this would be the same book without it… If I had a child in the eighth grade, this ain’t happening. If I had to move him out and homeschool him or put him somewhere else, this is not happening.”
Jonathan Pierce, School Board Member: “My objection, and I apologize to everyone sitting here, is that my standards matter- and I am probably the biggest sinner and crudest person in this room, can I lay that in front of a child and say read it, or this is part of your reading assignment?”
Mike Cochran, School Board Member: “I went to school here thirteen years. I learned math, English, Reading and History. I never had a book with a naked picture in it, never had one with foul language. In third grade I had one of my classmates come up to me and say hey what’s this word? I sounded it out and it was “damn,” and I was real proud of myself because I sounded it out. She ran straight to the teacher and told her I was cussing. Besides that one book which I think she brought from home, now I’ve seen a cuss word in a textbook at school. So, this idea that we have to have this kind of material in the class in order to teach history, I don’t buy it. “
What even is there to say? These Nazi-like idiots, and I don’t use that term lightly, should be ashamed of themselves but I know they won’t be. Here is something I have in opposition, the scene from Maus which I think about virtually every day, where Anja’s friends don’t give away her hiding place even when being tortured by a concentration camp guard. It happened in real life, and unlike Denise Cunningham, Bill Irvin, Quinten Howard, Sharon Brown, Mike Cochran, Mike Lowry, Donna Casteel, Jonathan Pierce, Tony Allman and Rob Shamblin no-one will ever know their names.
Maus was first published in December 1980, making it 36 years old now give or take. Happy birthday Maus.
Here are the two pages that stuck with me the most.
It’s January now. The other day my grandmother told me she cried when she first saw pictures of the Holocaust, because she had married a Jewish man. I believe her. With him she gave birth to a daughter, who later gave birth to me.
After she told me that, she cheerfully repeated her favorite antisemitic conspiracy theories to me, the Rothschild conspiracy and so on. She said she wanted to give Donald Trump a chance. He’s really not our President, on account of us all being British. “He’s hired neo-Nazis to share his throne,” I told her. “Literal neo-Nazis.” I tried to get her to at least look into it. I don’t think she will. “You’re very much like me, you know,” she said before she left. “Like me when I was younger.” She volunteers her time for UKIP sometimes. They’re a far-right British political party in which racism, homophobia and antisemitism runs rampant.
Art Spiegelman’s Maus is one of the most famous, most heartbreaking and most horrifying deceptions of the Holocaust that I can think of. The page on the left is the opening scene, in which Spiegelman recollects an old conversation he had with his father Vladek, a concentration camp survivor. “I fell, and my friends skated away without me.” “Friends? Your friends?” Vladek answers. “If you lock them together with no food for a week, then you could see what it is, friends!”
The page on the right is about Anja Spiegelman, Art’s mother, and what happened to her. She was imprisoned in Birkenau, but was sometimes able to intercept packages from Vladek tossed over the wall for her. One day, a Nazi guard caught her receiving a package, didn’t see her face, but chased her into one of the buildings. Anja’s friends hid her, the guard searched, but didn’t find anything. That evening, the guard lined up the women and said to them “The prisoner I chased this afternoon will now step forward… if you know who she is, push her forward or you’ll all suffer!” No-one pushed Anja forward. The guard tortured all the prisoners, made them “to run, to bend, to jump until they couldn’t anymore,” but still no-one pushed her forward. Then you could see what it is, friends! The torture continued for days, but still, still, no-one pushed her forward.
I think about those women a lot, come close to crying sometimes even. They don’t have names or human faces, not in the novel and not in history, and I imagine all of them are dead now. Their story and their heroism is over and done with in two pages. They probably never thought it’d be written down at all. They didn’t push her forward.
