Art Spiegelman · 1986 · survival

Art Spiegelman's account of his father Vladek's survival, drawn as a comic and awarded a Pulitzer. Volume one runs from Czestochowa in 1935 through the Sosnowiec ghetto to the gates of Auschwitz - told in a Queens living room forty years later, by a man his son cannot get on with.

1. 1
   Rego Park

   Queens, and the frame the whole book sits in: Art Spiegelman visiting his elderly father with a tape recorder, asking him to start at the beginning, and Vladek pedalling an exercise bike while he answers.

2. 2
   Czestochowa

   Vladek's home town, and 1935 - a young man doing well in textiles, with a girlfriend he is not serious about, before a cousin introduces him to Anja Zylberberg from Sosnowiec.

3. 3
   Sosnowiec

   Anja's family town, where they marry in 1937 into her father's money - and where their first son Richieu is born, and where the news from Germany starts arriving in the form of people who have left it.

4. 4
   Bielsko

   The textile factory Vladek runs with his father-in-law's backing, going home to Sosnowiec at weekends - the last stretch of ordinary life, and the part Vladek tells most readily.

5. 5
   Lublin

   Taken prisoner as a Polish soldier in 1939 and held in a camp for Jewish PoWs - released only by claiming a cousin's identity, and walking back into a country that has changed while he was inside it.

6. 6
   Srodula

   The ghetto outside Sosnowiec that the Jews of the town are moved into, and the bunkers built under coal cellars and behind false walls - families hiding in their own houses from the transports.

7. 7
   Auschwitz

   Betrayed by the smugglers who were to take them to Hungary, and put on a train. Volume one ends here, at the gate, with the story of what happens inside left for the second book.

8. 8
   Rego Park

   Back in Queens, and the last page: Art learns that his father burned Anja's diaries after her death, the only record of her side of it - and calls him a murderer, which is where the volume closes.