Maus

Sean Chi

ENG1120 BB

Jenn Macquarrie

Wednesday April 1, 2015

Does Valdek Suffer from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder?

In the graphic novel Maus by Art Spiegelman, Vladek’s annoying personality traits can be attributed from the trauma he experienced from surviving the Holocaust. Throughout the entirety of the story, Art attempts to try and put together the reasoning for his father’s behaviour. One can realize from analyzing Vladek’s life that undergoing traumatic circumstances changed his personality permanently. This change in personality is easily observed in analyzing three aspects of Vladek’s character, his cheapness, his resourcefulness, and his relationship with his closest family.

During the Holocaust, Nazi Germany attempted to exterminate the entire Jewish population from Europe. The Nazis effectively gathered and killed almost six million Jews, making it the most devastating genocide in history. Vladek and his first wife Anja were sent to Auschwitz, a concentration camp where at least one-third of all deaths occurred. In the story, many characters describe the horrors of trying to survive through the Holocaust. When Art sees his psychologist, a survivor himself, he asks how Auschwitz was like. The psychologist replies, “BOO! It felt like that, but always! From the moment you got into the gate, until the very end” (Maus 46). The victims suffered humiliation, starvation, tremendous physical strain, displacement, and lost all of their freedom. All of this suffering lead to the development of post traumatic stress disorder, a disease that will affect them for the rest of their lives. PTSD is caused by extreme trauma or stress that an individual is put through, that can have lasting consequences. According to the National Centre for PTSD, most people who are exposed to a traumatic, stressful event experience some of the symptoms of PTSD in the following days and weeks following the stressful exposure. Approximately thirty percent of these individuals...