The Holocaust.

For some reason, I'm not keen on reading books or watching movies related to the World War II, specially the ones about the Holocaust. They give me weird feelings. I remember the very first book I read related to that and it was "The Diary of Anne Frank", however, as I was very young - I was ten or eleven years old - I

wasn't aware of how terrible the story was, even though at that time I knew that it was based on real facts. I suppose that I wasn't very mature to understand something like that, though. Then, when I was in highschool and had to study the World War II for my history class I couldn't help feeling sick about all the atrocities that happened at that time. Although I really enjoyed studying history, I just couldn't enjoy that topic. Since then I've been avoiding watching or reading things related to that. However, a couple of years ago I watched "The Boy in he Stripped Pijamas" and my old feelings appeared again.

Nevertheless, I dared myself to read Maus, even though I always avoid anything related to the Holocaust, mainly because never have I read a graphic novel before, and also because this story was told in a very different way, so I decided to give it a chance. The first thing that caught my attention was the fact the characters of the story are animals, but not any animals. There were mice, cats, pigs, etc. and they all represented a certain group of people. However, I'm still trying to come up with an idea of why the author decided to do that. In addition, I couldn't get why such a tragic story was portrayed in that way, using drawings, because at first I thought that this book was meant for children. But it wasn't

. Another interesting thing that caught my attention is the way Vladek tells his story to his son Art and the fact that he burned his wife's diaries that contained her experiences during the Holocaust. It seems to me that, as his wife died years ago, he didn't want his wife's story and perspective to be told, who knows why. But it certainly makes a difference in the relationship between Vladek and his son.

I would say that reading Maus gave me a more real perspective of what happened in the War, even though half of the story was based on drawings, which I think is kind of weird because most of the movies related to the Holocaust have characters that are portrayed by real people and most of the stories I have read are written in first person. But there is something about Maus that makes this story something different. What do you think? What makes Maus different from the other ways used to tell these kind of stories?