Maus: A Survivor's Tale

Maus is being studied in Toronto's Catholic system at the middle school level.

This surprised me for two reasons. First, Maus (described below) is a difficult text and one I would have thought more appropriate for High School. Second, I was, at first, taken aback at the teaching itself.

Maus, by Art Spiegelman, is a biography of the author's father, Vladek Spiegelman, a Polish Jew and Holocaust survivor. What makes Maus remarkable is that it is a graphic narrative in which Jews are depicted as mice, while Germans are depicted as cats. While at first a bit disorientating, the work rapidly becomes engrossing and deeply moving.

But back to my surprise at the teaching itself. I thought back to my own middle school days. No one taught the Holocaust to us.

And that's because no one needed to.

Growing up I heard adults (Jew and Gentile) remembering the War. Casual remarks about snow in June (ashes from cremations at the death camps), seeing concentration camp tattoos at the supermarket, or grown up jokes about Lord Haw Haw on the radio, all taught about what happened without any conscious teaching. The War and the Holocaust were just part of the fabric of daily life. Studying the Holocaust at school was unnecessary -- and perhaps, in truth, too heartbreaking, for the children I went to school with were children of both the victims and the perpetrators.

But I can see that, today, Maus: A Survivor's Tale teaches something that did not need to be taught when I was a child.

But should it be taught today? Or, more properly, is the Holocaust something worthy of school study?

Some argue the Holocaust is not something to teach. There are other genocides -- why focus on this one?

There is an element of truth in such complaint. Despite the assertion "Never Again" genocide is still reasonably common. There are modern stories -- Hotel Rwanda (2004) springs to mind -- the collapse of Yugoslavia led to brutality that should be remembered. But there is something that makes the Holocaust more directly relevant to Canada.

Europe in the 1920's and 1930's was not all that different from Canada today. It was not a society in collapse. It was recognisably the same society as we have here today. It was a well ordered place where people were (in large part) judged on merit and not ethnic or religious background. A German Jew born in, say, 1900 could easily aspire to be a doctor, lawyer, politician -- just as today pretty well any Canadian born today can aspire to any role in society.

And yet, in a matter of a decade Jews went from full integration to the killing fields.

What the Holocaust teaches is that even the most well integrated (Jew, Muslim, Hindu -- heavens above Catholic) can be subject to ethnic cleansing. To avoid that is worth an effort in schools.