Ever since I was young I knew that comic books simply weren’t my thing. Where other children were looking for as many pictures as they could find with books, I found myself prone to books with fewer. If you handed me two chapter books, one with cover art, the other barren, I’d sooner inspect the spine of the plain novel than read the title of the former. The pictures I imagined were a waste of time, a picture spoke of a thousand words, so then, why not write those down instead? For a very long time I have not read any comic books or graphic novels, and after picking this one up I do not find myself itching to read more. This novel has convinced me that pictures do not speak a thousand words, and to me, most of the message of this book could easily be portrayed by many less pages of text while still holding their meaning. Only to two panels of two pages could I see truly where artwork would excel over the printed word, and even then the substance of which felt deliberate, though lost on me.

As I have read other graphic novels, so have I read stories by the prisoners of world war two, both fighting men and religious prisoners alike. I read these stories in middle school due to academic obligation, and upon reading this one, I can say confidently that I have learned nothing new of the atrocities of the war. What I knew at the age of twelve was not surpassed by this book. The discourse between the old father and artistic son feels like a plot device tacked on to sell the story of the old man. I feel as if it would have been more practical to make a comic about the old man’s life, and leave this “Context” out of it. On the note of things that seemed tacked on, the fact that every group is some type of animal makes little sense. Yes, there is the obvious entendre of cat chasing mouse, with the Nazis being the cats and the Jews being mice, buy it then begs the question as to why the Poles are pigs. Could the Nazi’s have seen the Poles as pigs? Pigs have no obvious relation in folk lore to cats, which in my eyes obscures that obvious connection by including pigs in the mix. The usage of the animal visages seems to be completely representative, as in the people are not legitimately anthropomorphized animals, but merely people represented by animal caricatures. This is proven in the scene where they are hiding in the cellar, and rats scatter over Anha’s fingers. They are compared to mice, which is the species that the Jews are being represented as. This complicates this representation, and is either deliberate and confusing, or an unnoticed and lazy coincidence.

I could not identify any clearly pronounced themes though out this novel, though there was one panel that stuck with me despite there being no reinforcing factors to it for the rest of the book. “It is easy to lay down and die, but to live, we must survive and struggle.”, said by the father to his first wife when hearing of news of their relatives’ passing. There has not yet to be a thinking man to grace this earth that has not come to the same conclusion that the only thing that will happen in life is misery. Death is a simply achieved inevitable rest, and when compared to life makes it seem excruciatingly burdensome. Death is the easiest thing someone can do, as it requires absolutely zero effort. There is no dedication, there is no struggle, and for your efforts there is reward eternal. Life, in stark contrast, is a struggle. Every beat of your heart and every breath of your lungs must be etched from the world around you, every step fueled with raw, indescribable drive for something that is inevitable unattainable, but irrefutably necessary. Whether the conveyance of these deeply philosophical themes was purposeful or simply something sparked by the boredom I felt flipping through the pages of this book is difficult for me to say, though in consideration of the rest of it, I lean more towards the latter.