Just weeks after the Nazi’s rise to power, they forced those they thought were beneath them, mainly Jews, but political opponents, ethnic Poles and Serbs, Roma, gay men and women, disabled folk, and Catholics into concentration camps where they were separated from loved ones, tortured, beaten, shot at, starved, and given fates worse than death. The aftermath of the Holocaust was on a scale unknown to the human race. Six million Jews alone were left dead, and the three million that survived were war-torn. Recounting their experiences might have seemed like an impossible task, but someone needed to do just that for the future generations. To say the unspeakable, an unsightly task at best, one might use methods such as metaphors, imagery, and repetition.…show more content… By comparing the mice’s suffering to that of dogs through a metaphor, the artist and author of Maus illustrate the universality of pain. The mouse had just been shot and was writhing on the floor, which the narrator, one of the mice, compares to a mad dog that had been put down. The document reads “And now I thought: ‘how amazing is it that [they react] the same like this neighbor’s dog’” (Document D). This extended metaphor “speaks” the unspeakable through illustrations and by comparing the Holocaust to something we can all understand and relate to, a game of cat-and-mouse. A terrible situation to be in, where the odds have been stacked against you since the beginning of
