Polish-Jewish Relations: 1,300 Keyword-Phrase-Indexed Book Reviews (by Jan Peczkis)

Comic Books, Graphic Novels, and the Holocaust, by Ewa Stanczyk (ed.) 2019. Routledge, London and New York

MAUS Stereotypes: Importance. Promoting and Maintaining Holocaust Supremacism

This small book packs quite a punch. I focus on relevant issues.

YES, MAUS AND ITS POLONOPHOBIA IS A BIG DEAL: THE IMPACT OF MAUS

There are those (including some Poles) who gaslight us by insisting that, whatever the portrayals of Poles in MAUS, it is unimportant because MAUS has very little influence on the public perception of Poles. Think again! While avoiding the issue of the Polonophobic character of MAUS (Poles as pigs, and very negative pigs at that), Ewa Stanczyk thus writes about the significance and power of MAUS, “Art Spiegelman’s MAUS transformed the comic book and revolutionized the cultural portrayals of war and genocide. More than 20 years after its publication, MAUS is still the best-known and most celebrated graphic novel on the subject…What the NBS Series [Holocaust: The Story of the Family Weiss in 1978] achieved with television audiences, MAUS did with its readers, particularly after its publication in book form in 1991.” (p. 1).

Now, how can MAUS have all these properties, and not play a significant role in instilling negative images about Poles among impressionable children? And not only in children?

BLATANT DOUBLE STANDARDS ON STEREOTYPES AND STEREOTYPING

Kees Ribbens (pp. 8-23) goes into considerable detail about the Nazi comics that negatively stereotyped the Jews of Holland. He condemns it. Yet neither he, nor any other author in this anthology, has any kind of problem with, much less condemnation of, the vile stereotyping of Poles in MAUS that goes on today.

MAUS AS A TOOL FOR PROMOTING HOLOCAUST SUPREMACY

Stanczyk writes, “The serialized publication of MAUS from 1980 and 1991 coincided with a wider emergence of the Holocaust as an important event in the American historical memory…The Americanization of the Holocaust…” (pp. 1-2). Notice that no other genocides are part of the American historical memory. Only the Jews’ Holocaust enjoys this privilege. And needless to say, no one speaks about the Americanization of the Armenian genocide or the Americanization of the Gypsy genocide.

“DE-JUDAIZATION” COMPLAINTS ARE A MEANS OF ENFORCING HOLOCAUST SUPREMACISM AND PUTTING DOWN OTHER VIEWS

Stanczyk makes these revealing statements, “This ‘de-Judaization’ of comic books on Auschwitz was and is still visible in other European countries. As I show in my contribution about Poland, whereas the death camp is often at the heart of those narratives, Jews tend to be pushed to the background. Instead, it is the gentile Poles who take the center stage in those stories, replicating the traditional discourse of Poles as heroes and victims.” (p. 4). Oh dear! How awful it is that Jews don’t ALWAYS take center stage, and do so EVERYWHERE! How rascally of those Poles for daring not to fall in line with standard Judeocentric thinking!

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HIGH-LEVEL FRENCH COLLABORATION WITH THE THIRD REICH

For all the mountains of blame put on Poland with regards to the German-made Shoah, she never had a Quisling government. France did. Claire Gorrara recounts the consequences, “The rounding up, internment and deportation of over 12,000 Jewish people on the nights of the 16 and 17 July 1942 by French policemen has come to represent the Vichy’s regime’s broader collusion with the Nazi occupier and the enactment of the Holocaust on French soil.” (pp. 123-124).