"When I was your age.."

At this point, you’re probably feeling pretty bad for Art. Born as the child of two bruised and broken holocaust survivors, Art found himself in the mental ward at a young age, traumatized with feelings of guilt over his mother’s suicide.

But Anja’s suicide wasn’t all bad for Art. In a way, it acted as an impetus for Art to write Maus. After she died, he realized that he really didn’t know much about his parent’s, or his own, past. What he does next is perhaps the biggest indicator of his mental incompetence: he asks his father to tell him stories about his past on purpose.



Seems like everyone's grandparents had to walk up the same hill in the snow
every day of their life.

You read that right. On purpose. Art asked his father, Vladek, to sit down for HOURS AT A TIME, and tell him stories about his times in the Holocaust. Meanwhile, you avoid all members of your family at all costs in fear that they’ll utter the dreaded “When I was your age…”.

This task becomes even more unbelievable when you factor in the fact that Vladek is pretty much senile, and I mean that in the nicest way possible. When Art tries to get him to talk, his stories are always scattered, and never in chronological order, making it impossibly hard for Art to get a good idea of what really happened.

And when Art tries to get Vladek to talk about Anja, Vladek is even harder to get information from. At one point he even tells Art, “I can tell you….She went through the same what me: TERRIBLE!” Regardless of the amount of time he spends trying to get information out of Vladek, Art never really gets a good idea about his mother’s life.

In an interview he gave with PBS, Art explained that he was never "overwhelmed by thoughts of a death camp", but that simply that the truth about them had just always been in his life. Additionally, because his parents chose to stay in the company of fellow survivors, he had always been surrounded by the experience of the Holocaust. However, instead of interesting Art, his closeness with the experiences had the opposite effect.

Because he was so used to having the experiences of the Holocaust around him, he never realized that the experience was one that was strange or out of the ordinary. Thus, as he was growing up, the memories of his parents during the dark time never spiked his interest. Unfortunately, he only became interested in their past after Anja was gone, and Vladek was not so forthcoming with information. Had he been interested in the experiences at a younger age, it's possible that his memories would be more rich and fulfilling than they eventually ended up being.

Art’s experiences are a perfect example of a person who is living in “postmemory”, a phrase coined by Marianna Hirsch (You can read more about it here). Postmemory is when a person’s life is “dominated by memories that are not his own”, and specifically applies to the relation of children of survivors to the survivors themselves.

Art’s memories of the Holocaust have been created entirely through postmemory. Everything he knows about it, and about his mother, has come from Vladek. Because the memories are not truly Art’s, they lack authenticity. And because they have only come from Vladek, as Art was only interested in them after his mother’s death, they lack any maternal input from Anja as well.

But for Art, this isn’t a problem, because he knows that his mother has journals that she kept about her experiences, and they’re around here somewhere. Vladek will find them any day, and give them to Art to read, right? Right?

Art's reaction (presumably).

No. Not right.

Those journals, ones filled with Anja’s writing about her time during the Holocaust, the only way Art had of getting reliable information about his mother after her suicide, and Art’s only chance at ever reconciling his emotions were burned by Vladek all because of a bad day.

Just in case you weren’t keeping score, that’s Art-0, Cruelty and Despair- 1,378.

Without Anja’s journals, all Art is left with is whatever stories and memories he can get out of his absent-minded father. It’s not all for naught, as Art was apparently able to get enough out of his father to write two books about, but he is still missing a pretty significant piece of the puzzle. After Anja’s suicide, even though Art exhausted every possible source of information, he was never able to recover the information about his mother specifically that he had been searching for.