Art Spiegelman
Maus
296 pages
In the book Maus I learned about how resourceful the
Jews were in WWII. They built hide-a-ways to stay away from the Nazis, they
bought food with their precious gold and silver through the black market, and
saved their daily rations of food and cigarettes to barter with. This helped me think in a different way: I thought about how I waste stuff and throw
away food in the garbage –food to them was very valuable. I wonder how the food
in Auschwitz looked and tasted, how it felt to be bitten by the lice and flies
and how cold it must felt in the winter walking around in wooden shoes and thin
prison uniforms. This book teaches the
reader to make use of what one has and be grateful for little things.
The technical word that I found was “kapo” (page 223). According
to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kapo_(concentration_camp)
, “A kapo or prisoner functionary (German: Funktionshäftling) was a prisoner in
a Nazi concentration camp who was assigned by the SS guards to supervise forced
labor or carry out administrative tasks in the camp.” These kapos were fed well while the other
prisoners only got bread with wood in it and watery soup. They weren’t always mean but many kapos
yelled at, beat and abused other prisoners.
I feel this was wrong but they only did it because they wanted to
survive.
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