Quotes Explained in Maus
"To go, it was no good, but, not to go - it was also no good" (90).
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Spoken by Vladek, this quote relates to readers the situation that all Jewish members were held in. To leave their country, they would be killed. But to stay, they would also be killed as well. Essentially, the Jewish community were being forced to live like animals and there was nothing they could do about it. If they fought, not only would they lose their lives, but the persecution for those who lived would probably get much worse a lot quicker. To our group, this quote was extremely important because it relayed a forced static situation. The members of this community were forced to live a life that was essentially not livable...and this quote was only the start of what was to come.
"On Wednesday the vans came. Anja and I saw her father at the window. He was tearing his hair and crying. He was a millionaire, but even this didn't save him his life" (117).
The importance of this quote comes from the basis that Vladek tells it in. Anja (Vladek's wife) had come from an extremely wealthy family that helped Vladek start a business, and gave them a home. When the Nazis started cracking down on the Jewish people, Anja's parents allowed them into their large home and paid extravagant amounts of money in order for them to all be safe. However, when it came to getting people to help them escape, no one wanted to help Anja's parents no matter what the sum because of their age. Extremely important in understanding how to survive during this genocide, this quote is alarmingly sad and depressing because of the raw hard truth that Vladek portrays - even the wealthiest people weren't able to survive the Nazis. No one was safe, and no one could trust anyone.
"It was crying and praying. So long we survived. And now we waited only that they shoot, because we had not else to do" (267).
Near the end of Spiegelman's novel, he tells the story of how his father learned that the war was over. However, just because the war was over did not mean that any of the Jews were safe. From the camp Vladek was in when the news broke out of the war being over, they were sent on train to another spot where more troops apprehended them. Even though Vladek and all of the people with them were "supposedly" safe, they were still under the wrath of whatever Nazis they saw while trying to obtain freedom. This quote is important as well as ironic, because it describes what the Jewish people had to endure continually for the past several years - waiting. Not only did they have to wait to be shipped off to concentration camps, wait for their family to be separated, wait for food, and wait for freedom, now that freedom had finally come, they had to live in fear of freedom. No one knew what to do or how to be safe because there were so many years of hiding and suffering.