No Heroes: A Memoir of Coming Home

Sam and James Learn About the Holocaust

Sam is reading Maus, a comic book about the Holocaust that depicts Jews as mice and Nazis as cats. Rita worries about the effect on Sam because she learned of her parents’ experience at age twelve by watching a film that featured footage from the camps. Until then, she had no idea what her parents had endured.

I think reading Maus is a good way for Sam to understand history. Later I’ll explain that his grandparents were mice. Every couple of pages Sam asks a question. I decide to sit across the room and transcribe our conversation in the same manner as when talking to Arthur on the phone.

“How do you know you’re a Jew?” Sam says.

“Because your mom and dad are Jews.”

“Know what I’d do? I’d tell people I’m not a Jew.”

“Some people did that.”

“I’d leave.”

“Some did that, too.”

“What’s a dictator?” Sam said.

“A boss with an army who makes people do what he wants.”

“That’s stupid.”

“Why?” I said.

“Because you couldn’t say he was a bad boss, right?”

“That’s one of the problems all right.”

“Did all the Germans hate the Jews or did they just do what Hitler said?”

“A little of both.”

“Why didn’t they kill him?”

“Who?”

“This guy in here, the little mouse guy. They knew he was a Jew and it was World War II. So why didn’t they kill him? I mean, these people had the power to kill him and they hated him. So why not?”

I shrug and he goes back to reading. His grandfather has pondered the same question every day for fifty years. Arthur craves a reason for his survival. Irene admits the truth more readily than her husband. She says survival was random and she was lucky, but Arthur doesn’t want to believe it is that simple.

Sam goes into the other room and James sits in the same chair — my chair — and opens Maus. He cannot read but he studies the pictures very carefully. He is five years old and wants to be an artist when he grows up.

“Why is this comic book in black and white?” he says.

“Why do you think?”

“Because it was made before color.”

After a few minutes, James brings the book to me. He points to a scene of mouse prisoners and cat captors. One prisoner has been promoted to the boss of other prisoners, what Arthur called the Jewish Police. He is drawn with the face of a pig.

“Is this guy a pig?” James asks.

I tell him yes and he wants to know why. I wonder how to explain the cultural metaphor of a pig as a cop. I tell James the guys a pig because the cat and mouse faces were already used. That satisfies him and he returns to the chair, and finds a large word in a dialogue balloon. He carefully spells the word, as he has heard his brother do.

“What does a-a-w-o-o-w-a-h!’ mean?”

At my request James repeats the spelling. I figure it is the sound of a siren and tell him so, but he says it’s not. He shows the picture to me. The word in question is the wailing of a Belgian Jew who knows he’ll be killed in the morning. I tell James it means the mouse is sad. Eventually James concludes that the mice are going to jail for not wearing their hats.

At supper, Sam is still thinking about Maus. He is a serious boy, prone to prolonged pondering. He wants to be a scientist when he grows up.

“I’m glad there was a Hitler,” he says.

“Why?” I say.

“Because if he hadn’t lived, Grandma and Grandpa wouldn’t go to New York and have Mommy. Then you wouldn’t have met her. And there’d be no me. I have to be glad, see?”

I stare at him, awed by the practicality of his logic. He is an implacable child, a careful thinker. For me to present a counterargument is to attack his very being, deny his existence in the same way the Nazis tried to deny the Jews.