Art Spiegelman · 1991 · survival

The second volume, subtitled And Here My Troubles Began, which took the Pulitzer in 1992. Vladek's account of Auschwitz, the march west to Gross-Rosen and the last weeks at Dachau - set against a son in a Manhattan studio who cannot work for the weight of a story that is not his own.

1. 1
   The Catskills

   Summer 1979, and Art and Francoise drive up to the bungalow colony where Vladek is staying - the scene volume two opens on, with Art admitting he has no idea how to draw the rest of it.

2. 2
   Manhattan

   The studio after the first volume's success, and the sessions with Pavel his therapist - Art wearing a mouse mask at his own drawing board, unable to work for the weight of a story that is not his.

3. 3
   Rego Park

   Queens again, and the core of the recordings: the camp interviews, made across a kitchen table with the tape running and Vladek breaking off to complain about Mala or count his pills.

4. 4
   Florida

   Vladek and Mala relocate south, and his health goes - the last stretch of the present-day story, told between hospital visits and phone calls Art does not want to take.

5. 5
   Auschwitz

   Vladek's account of the camp: registered, tattooed, and surviving by being useful - teaching English to a kapo, then tinsmithing, then shoe repair, and getting messages across to Anja in Birkenau.

6. 6
   Gross-Rosen

   January 1945, and the camp is evacuated ahead of the Soviet advance - marched west through the snow in Lower Silesia, on the road that later gets called the death march.

7. 7
   Dachau

   Bavaria, and the last camp: no work, no food, and typhus through the barracks - the part of the account where Vladek stops describing events and starts describing the inside of a fever.

8. 8
   Sosnowiec

   Back to the town they were married in, after the war and after months of not knowing - and Anja is alive, which is the one thing in the whole story that goes the way anybody would want.