"They hanged there one full week."

                             

In Maus, Spiegelman tells his father's story in an extremely vivid and captivating manner. Page 83 discusses one of Vladek's most undigestible moments of the holocaust: the hangings. Even when Art displays the gut-wrenching illustration in panel two, the faces are covered up, turned around, or tilted in a manner in which the reader literally can't look them in the eye. They're completely stripped of their identities that only Vladek recognized. To the Nazis they're merely walking targets dressed in costumes of formalwear. In the following two panels, Vladek narrates short summaries of each of the characters hanged, isolating only each of their feet. This was drawn not simply for the act of dramatizing the hangings. It once again goes to show how readers, unaffected pigs in the audience, and the Nazis are only able to see identical hanged legs with little significance. This combined with Vladek's accounts of the individuals reveal that every one had a story, but not everyone's is always told. The next panel's nightmare scene makes it completely stand out from the rest of the page. The haunting memory of these hanged Jews tower over Vladek, tormenting him in the cage he's trapped in, represented by the windows and the image of the Jews themselves enclosing him in this inconceivable reality. This burden casts a literal and figurative shadow over him, constantly terrorizing him and darkening his world. This emphasizes the tragic underlying truth that the trauma of a firsthand victim can never be entirely replicated, nor can it be explained or taught to anyone else in its most excruciating form. Notice that this shadow isn't cast onto his son, whom readers see happily playing in the corner with a doll. Although this trauma may not be directly placed onto him, his playing with the doll resemble those helplessly dangling like puppets, suggesting that the past is inevitably, indirectly forced upon him.