What We Did

We began with a silent conversation in response to panels and excerpts from Maus. This allowed us to generate questions, like the one above, that became touchstones for our collective inquiry.

Those questions led us to explore the history of the Holocaust alongside our own family histories, just as Spiegelman does in Maus. Students interviewed family members to learn where and how their loved ones lived during World War II, surfacing the cultural and historical legacies that informed their awareness and experience of the Holocaust. We used these histories as catalysts for investigating core issues in the text and contemporary society, including the persistence of racism and anti-Semitism, witnessing and the role of the witness, and the tension between empathy and Holocaust denial.

We explored these themes through various artistic engagements and creative responses. We partnered with the Art Gallery of Ontario, whose special exhibition of Spiegelman’s works, CO-MIX: A Retrospective, allowed us to explore the craft of comics art. Students chose panels from Maus that elicited a strong emotional response in them and crafted paintings, featured below, inspired by Belgian artist Pierre Alechinsky. They also constructed multi-modal and multi-sensory arts projects that captured their ongoing inquiries into the Holocaust and its contemporary resonances.