When “Maus” Became Part of My Story

Thank you to Feiga Khutoretsky for helping to edit this article. Reader discretion is advised for detailed discussion of the atrocities committed during Holocaust.

You may already be familiar with the fact that Maus, an award-winning 1980 graphic novel by Art Spiegelman about the horrors his parents endured during the Holocaust, was recently banned by a school board in Tennessee. Just Googling Maus will give you enough news and opinion articles about the ban and why the school board’s decision — based in part on supposed “nudity” shown despite the characters all being drawn as animals — is wrong that I don’t need to cover it. However, there is something that I found out about myself recently that made me realize just how necessary books like Maus are in helping the next generation understand why and how atrocities like the Holocaust matters — and preventing them for the future.

Recently, I became motivated to once again try to research my family tree. ‘Sutorius’ is such a unique name, and I wanted to see where it came from. Using Geni, FamilySearch, Ancestry, and MyHeritage, I managed to trace the Sutorius name back nine generations, all of them before immigrating coming from Württemberg, Germany. Once I had a handle on the men of the family who carried on the surname, I then got curious about genealogy of the women who married into — after all, they were my family too. One of the first women I focused on was my father’s grandmother, my great-grandmother, Emily Sutorius. I found her marriage license, which included her maiden name, Plaut, and using that, I then found her parents and siblings. The main goal of Geni, where I was inputting the different branches of my family tree, is to make one collective “world tree” that can show the many paths of how we are all related to one another, even if very distantly. This feature also makes it much easier to find information, as when I put in Emily’s parents, Geni immediately recognized another user had also put that same information into their family tree and offered that we merge the two trees together. What I found when the two trees merged astounded me.

Not only were multiple members of my great-grandmother’s family Jewish, but many had died in the Holocaust. They died in the Warsaw ghetto, the Łódź ghetto, Auschwitz, and Theresienstadt. I looked at their photographs, pictures of their death certificates, and grave memorials with my mouth agape. Horrified and shocked did not even begin to describe it. I knew well that their lives had been stolen from them as they were starved, tortured, and murdered. The Nazis were merciless — the youngest was three years old, a life not even begun before it was crushed. I began crying. Click on any family member and Geni will tell you exactly how you are related — they were my great-great-aunt and uncles, first or second cousins thrice or twice removed, or great-great-great grandparents. I may not have ever known them or share more than 1–5% of my DNA with them, but it didn’t matter — they were still my family, and apparently, this was part of my history.

This revelation about my ancestry was both earth-shattering and seemingly unchanging at the same time. I was still who I am— a blonde, blue-eyed American white woman with two Christian parents. I hadn’t identified with Christianity since I was around 12, but I also knew that Judaism was not just a religion in the same way that Christianity was. Judaism is an ethnoreligious identity, combining aspects of an ethnicity with religion. Therefore, a person can be ethnically Jewish but not religious, or religious (such as in the case of a convert) but not ethnically Jewish. Further, identities such as the Ashkenazi, Sephardic, Mizrahi, and other communities are tied to historic Jewish sites and communities.

Whoopi Goldberg recently got into hot water for her comments stating that the Holocaust was not about race. In the sense that racial categories are made up by humans, Goldberg is right. That is not what she meant, though. The Nazis very much considered Jews to be a race that was opposed to the Aryan “race” (which they classified as German and Nordic peoples). Goldberg’s view of race, informed by American history which focuses almost exclusively on skin-color, makes it hard to contextualize that the Nazis viewed the Holocaust as a genocide based on race. However, there is a stark difference between being defined as a race by an oppressor in an attempt to subjugate and kill, and self-identifying as an ethnic group based on historically shared traits. It is important to note that with the introduction of DNA tests like 23andMe, there continues to be a debate about Jewishness being genetically defined in order to “prove” one’s Jewish heritage in order to do things like marry in some states such as Israel, or if it even such tests are permissable under Jewish law (Halacha). For those wishing to dive deeper into understanding the complex intersections between ethnicity, genetics, and religion in Judaism, I strongly recommend clicking the link to read Oscar Schwartz’s 2019 piece in The Guardian.

In other words, I did not suddenly feel as though I was Jewish — I did not have the cultural or social background, nor the religious one, which I felt were probably the most important signifiers of Jewish identity. What I did feel changed inside me was the urge to understand more about the history that was placed before me. I began researching more about the ghettos and camps that my relatives died in, the social and political conditions in Europe leading up to the Holocaust, how the Nazis disseminated propaganda and misinformation among the general population, and the aftermath of the war. Even outside the Holocaust, I began researching more about historic Jewish holidays, traditions, and historical sites. I wanted to honor their existences by fully understanding their lives and therefore bringing meaning to them.

I also began reflecting on the times in my life before this I engaged with meaningful stories about the Holocaust and Jewish identity— relating to Anne Frank when we read her diary in 8th grade, reading Maus in high school and correcting my classmates in history class when we began studying the Holocaust, and putting my all into one of my college Senior theses that analyzed the generational trauma of the Holocaust in Fugitive Pieces, among others. These pieces of literature so moved me, and when they did, moved me towards understanding more about the real world events that transpired. This knowledge, once planted inside me, was not something that I could be rid of — it grew with me and helped me understand the world around me to recognize the sickness of anti-semitism and when it occurred.

Six million Jews alone died in the Holocaust. Statistically speaking, everyone is related (if even only distantly) in some way to one of those that perished. Yet even if this weren’t true, it doesn’t matter — the ugliness of what the Nazis believed and did to Jews is an unparalleled (though not the first) atrocity that should have never happened. It paints an ugly stain on humanity and Nazism, facism, anti-semitism, and ideas similar to it that led to the Holocaust should forever be scrutinized and called out for what they are. This is why it is so important to understand not just what these things mean, but how they were practically implemented during Hitler’s time so that we can recognize them in modern day. Stories like The Diary of Anne Frank, Maus, Fugitive Pieces, and others demonstrate with empathy and nuance the reality of what Jews lived through during the Holocaust; the humanity within their suffering. This is why they are so threatening to book banners — they shed light on the nonsensical boogeyman scapegoating and stereotypes that the Nazis propagated and Neo-Nazis still lean on today. Book banners understand this, and know that it will not be isolated to just the Holocaust. Teaching critical thinking skills like this will mean that policies like stringent voter I.D. laws, transgender athlete bans, and denying asylum seekers entry at the border will suddenly seem a whole lot more absurd and barbaric.

These bans are not isolated to just Maus and the Holocaust — the ongoing debate on “critical race theory” being taught in schools can simply be boiled down to a ban on any history of American racism against black people being taught. The “Don’t Say Gay” bill is the same concept, but a ban on LGBT+ lives and history. There is much evidence that not only is this an effort to destroy public education of critical thinking skills that would prevent authoritarian movements, but to destroy public education altogether. Public education is the foundation to which we can understand how our stories as human beings connect and collide with one another from different backgrounds so that we can do better for each other in the future. Privatized education, on the other hand, can concentrate narratives to empathize exclusively with the select few in power who control and profit from them. Eventually, the stories of the rich and powerful would be all that was left.

My father told me that his grandmother told him her surname was “Plant” not Plaut, but the marriage license and census information proves otherwise. While my father could just be remembering wrong, I also wonder if Emily made a conscious decision to tell others her surname was slightly different than it was to protect herself and her family. Emily may have been aware that her family back in Germany and Poland was being targeted (the Nazis traced who was Jewish all the way up to ones grandparents, and sometimes further) and decided it wasn’t worth the risk. Antisemitism even in the U.S. was high and it would have been easy to hide; her family had immigrated to New York and she most likely converted to Christianity when she married. It’s likely that when my grandfather and great uncle, Emily’s sons, both fought in World War II, they didn’t know they were fighting for their own family.

Emily, and the rest of my family, deserve to have their stories told, even if they are not glamorous. While Maus may not be their specific story, it doesn’t particularly matter — it is a part of our human narrative. Part of why the Tennessee school board banned Maus was because it shows the depths of human suffering, cruelty, and anguish. However, I would also argue it shows the opposite as well: the highs of human strength, perseverance, compassion, and our ability to change things for the better. We can only do better if we are able to recognize why things were wrong before, and that power is contained within our unique and diverse stories.

To read more about rising antisemitism and lowered Holocaust education rates in the United States, you can click the previous links.