It Gets Worse

Sometimes, life is really hard. Like when you’ve already poured your bowl of cereal, and then you realize there’s no milk and you have to awkwardly pour it back in the bag. Or when you have three classes in a row in the one building on campus that doesn’t have Wi-Fi. It’s situations like these that make life incredibly hard to handle.

That's rough too.

But it always gets worse. Trust me. And not just in the sense that you could be living somewhere terrible like Syria or New Jersey, or have nothing to eat but grass, but in the sense that there are always people who have it worse than you.

Like Art Spiegelman. 

I mean, sure, there are people who live really tragic, horrible, terrible lives, but as compared to normal people standards, Art’s got it pretty bad. Fresh out of a stint in the psych ward, his mother killed herself, and he was left go on with his life practically on his own, thanks to his poor relationship with his father. If that’s not enough to put someone in a bit of a depression then I couldn’t tell you what is.



Sorry Art. Maybe Someday.

It’s not really Art’s fault though. In a lot of ways, his parents are more to blame than himself. Art’s bad luck goes all the way back to the holocaust, the time that his parents lived in. If it hadn’t been for the destruction caused in the Holocaust, there’s a pretty good chance that Art would be living in the suburbs, in a nice house with a picket fence with both his parents, one and a half siblings, and a golden retriever. But he’s not, and there are a lot of different reasons why that didn’t work out for him.

To explain the reasons why it’s unlikely that Art would have been able to grow up with all the drama he did and still come out unscathed, I’ll present a brief metaphor. Think of planting a flower. It’s a pretty nice flower, there’s not really anything wrong with it. But it got planted in terrible soil. Just horrible. It’s from somewhere really bad, with poor soil quality, probably New Jersey. The bad soil destroys the roots of the flower, and it starts to wilt. Eventually, the bad soil works its way up the roots, through the stem, and to the leaves. By no fault of its own, the flower dies.

Art Spiegelman is that flower. Even though he wasn’t alive during the holocaust, he got planted in its soil because of his parent’s involvement. Given how chaotic the times were (seven million deaths are good indicators of the chaos), the effects of the Holocaust on Art’s parents were so strong that they continued an entire generation down to affect Art himself.

Within the stories of the millions of lives lost during the holocaust are some that affected Art’s parents, Vladek and Anja, very intimately. During their times in the ghetto, Vladek would trade illegal goods with others in the ghetto. It may not sound too hardcore, but it was actually pretty gangster for the time. So gangster in fact, that when the Nazis caught some of Vladek’s friends doing it, they hung them. In the streets. For days.



Generally, walking through the streets and seeing some of your friends hanging dead in the street for doing something that you’ve been doing too certainly trumps running out of milk.

Hitting even closer to home, Vladek and Anja’s son, Richieu is one of the seven million killed. His death is not for lack of trying on behalf of his parents. Vladek and Anja sent Richieu away to live with someone in a place that they though he would be safe. However, even with their strongest efforts, Richieu is eventually poisoned by the woman watching over him when faced with the threat of the gas chamber.

Losing a child is a pretty serious thing to deal with. Losing a child that you tried so hard to protect in such a time as the Holocaust is another thing entirely. The loss of Richieu is a failure to Vladek and Anja, one that they take to heart, and for Anja, one that kicks of the series of events that eventually lead to her suicide.

For both Vladek and Anja, it was their experiences of loss in the Holocaust that shaped them into what they were going to be in the future. Being surrounded by death left them with memories and experiences that compromised their futures, as well as Art’s.

The pretty flower was doomed from the start. It can’t grow in bad soil. Art had a rough start right of the bat. The death, fear, and heartache experienced by his parents, contaminated the “soil” that he was given to grow in. It changed his parents, giving each of them some type of complex that Art would eventually have to deal with.

So next time you’re having a bad day, or life is getting you down, just think: It could be worse. You could be Art Spiegelman.

Or you could live in New Jersey.