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1-Page Summary of Maus

Overall Summary

Prologue

It was 1958. Arthur Spiegelman, who is narrating this story from a distance of decades, remembers an incident from his childhood. He was ten or eleven years old and roller skating with two of his friends in Rego Park when he fell off the skateboard. His friends laughed at him and skated away without waiting for him to get up.

Artie comes home from school and his father is working in the yard. His father has a mouse head, which suggests that he’s an immigrant. The father asks Artie why he keeps sniffling and tells him to come over and hold a piece of wood for him while he saws it.

When Artie tells his father that he fell and his friends left him, Vladek stops working. He looks at Artie in disbelief because it seems like a really bad thing to do to leave someone behind when they’re hurt. Vladek says that if he were in the same situation, he would lock up his friends for a week without food or water so they could experience what it’s like to be hungry and thirsty.

Part 1, Chapter 1

Artie, now an adult, is visiting his father in Rego Park. They greet each other warmly and it has been a long time since they last saw each other. Artie notices that Vladek has aged during this time and he also notes that both of them have changed over the years because of their parents’ deaths. Inside the house, Artie greets Mala who is Vladek’s wife and she takes his coat to hang up in the closet but her husband scolds her for using a wire hanger instead of wood one.

After dinner, Vladek leads Artie into a bedroom so he can pedal on a stationary bicycle while they talk. This is good for his heart, says Vladek. Artie tells him that he’s been thinking about drawing a comic book about Vladek’s life in Poland during World War II and asks if it would be okay to do that. He also assures him that he wants to hear the stories and asks him to tell how he met Anja (Artie’s mother).

Vladek begins his story with some hesitation. He first met Anja when he was living in a small city in Poland called Czestochowa and working as a textile worker. At the time, Vladek says, he was young and very good looking. Many women tried to date him, but one woman named Lucia Greenberg asked their mutual friend Yulek to introduce them. After a few dates with her, Vladek remembers that she started showing up wherever he went and kept asking him to invite her home.

Vladek tells Artie that Lucia insisted on being with him, but Vladek didn’t care for her. A flashback shows them having sex in a bed while he adjusts his tie and she lies in lingerie. She asks if they’re engaged, and he ignores the question. Her family was nice, but poor; therefore, they couldn’t afford a dowry.

The next panel shows Vladek disembarking from a train and being greeted by his cousin. He has come to spend a holiday with his family in Sosnowiec, which is 40 miles away from Czestochowa. In the crowd are Jews with mouse heads and Christians dressed as pigs. His cousin tells him that she wants him to meet her friend Anja, who is an intelligent girl from a rich family.

The next day, Vladek went to meet his cousin and Anja. The two women talked in English, but they didn’t know that he understood them. He found both of the women attractive and very nice. His cousin left him alone with Anja so they could talk privately. She was embarrassed when she realized that he knew what she said about him earlier, but she quickly recovered her composure and started talking to him again like nothing had happened.

Anja and Vladek plan to talk on the phone. He tells Artie that they began talking, and she wrote him beautiful letters. When he received a picture of her, he bought a nice frame for it. Soon after, Lucia saw the picture and got upset because Anja wasn’t as attractive as Lucia was. She insulted Anja’s looks when Vladek mentioned that he wanted to marry her. It took some convincing from Artie for Vladek to admit that Anja may not have been as pretty or thin as Lucia was, but she had a wonderful mind and personality so it was easy for him to fall in love with her once they started talking.