first volume opens by quoting Adolf Hitler’s declaration, “The Jews are undoubtedly a race, but they are not human.” The first chapter tells of how Vladek broke off a long-standing sexual relationship to marry his wife, closing with Vladek telling Spiegelman that he should not use the story because “suchprivate things, I don’t want you should mention.”

Spiegelman makes no attempt to sanitize his father’s character, knowing that it is through such “private things” that the horrors are revealed. Vladek tells of the increasing cruelties directed against Jews, and Spiegelman’s images—such as the German troops taking Anja’s bedridden mother’s bed in “The Noose Tightens”—emphasize the situation. The first volume, concluding with Vladek and Anja’s arrival at Auschwitz, truly “bleeds history.”

The second volume is more personal. Interspersed among tales of Vladek’s relationship with another concentration camp survivor, Mala, and Spiegelman’s own travails dealing with the success of the first volume is Vladek’s tale of how he survived in Auschwitz. His abiding love for Anja is shown to be what sustained both of them through the camp. By the end of Maus, the reader understands Vladek and his actions. The interaction across the generations makes Vladek’s Holocaust survival tale quite accessible.

One of the best-known works about the Holocaust is Schindler’s List (1982), by Australian author Thomas Keneally. The fact-based story of a gentile businessman who risks his life to protect his Jewish employees was made into a feature film, which debuted in 1993, by Steven Spielberg. Keneally’s work is realistic; unfortunately, much popular literature reduces the Holocaust to a caricature of evil. Such work does nothing to strengthen the memory of the Holocaust as it actually happened. In Ira Levin’s The Boys from Brazil (1976), Josef Mengele survives in Brazil, producing young clones of Adolf Hitler and rearing the boys in a manner intended to produce new Hitlers. Mengele hopes to renew Hitler’s “cleansing” efforts. The plan is foiled by a Jewish Nazi hunter (loosely based on Simon Wiesenthal). Levin’s work, undermined by authorial moralizing, is one of the better popular tales whose abrogation of memory trivializes history.

Stephen King’s “Apt Pupil,” which appears in Different Seasons (1982), features Todd Bowden, who discovers that his quiet, unassuming neighbor was “Kurt Dussander, the Blood-Fiend of Patin.” He forces Dussander to tell him tales of the atrocities committed. King’s work is part of a subgenre of Holocaust tales: stories in which non-Jewish protagonists become fascinated with and sympathetic to the suffering. Most interesting among these is Emily Prager’s Eve’s Tattoo (1991), the story of a woman who, for her fortieth birthday, gets the identification number of a death camp victim stenciled onto her arm “to give the victim life.” Eve also tells tales not only about life under the Nazis but also about the deliberate and inadvertent complicities among women that allowed the regime to enact its brutal tortures.

Jane Yolen’s Briar Rose (1992) is the story of Rebecca (“Becca”) Berlin, who tries to discover the truth of her grandmother’s assertion that she—known to the family only as “Gemma”—was the Briar Rose of fairy tale, resuscitated from death by a Prince Charming. Becca follows the few clues she can find about Gemma’s life—photographs, immigration documents, apartment leases— to Poland. Becca learns much about the attitude in the United States toward the Jewish refugees (all of whom were sent to a barbed-wired Relocation Camp in Oswego, New York). After meeting a survivor of the camps, she discovers that Gemma was sent to an extermination camp from which no woman ever survived.

Becca’s search leads her in the second half of the book to Poland, where a guide named Magda Bronski aids her in her search and shows her Polish society. When Becca and Magda ask the residents around Chelmno about the concentration camp in which Gemma was interred, the reply of one of the residents is “that nothing happened here and that we should take our Jew questions away or that the nothing would happen again.”

Yolen’s young adult novel The Devil’s Arithmetic (1988) also deals with the persistence of memory. Thirteen-year-old Hannah “is tired of remembering” as she approaches her grandparents’ house for the first night of Passover. As she opens the door for Elijah, she finds herself being called Chaya (her Hebrew name, meaning “life”) in a small Jewish village in Nazi-occupied Poland. Matters soon go from bad to worse as she finds herself taken in a cattle car to a concentration camp, where survival is dependent on whim and life, especially Jewish life, is expendable.

British author Martin Amis’ Time’s Arrow (1991) features a man living his life backwards, becoming progressively more terrifying to the reader as he finds himself becoming the camp doctor at Auschwitz. Amis manages the novel, and the disingenuous tone, with a grace that is at times almost too precious, but still manages to plumb some of the depths of the horror. William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice (1979) is the tale of a Polish refugee, Sophie Zawatowska, who becomes involved with an aspiring writer. She is a survivor of the Holocaust and suffers from guilt about having survived and about her choice: A Nazi forced her to decide which of her two children was to die.