Maus: Part 1, Chapter 6 Summary & Analysis

When Artie arrives at the house for his next visit with Vladek, he finds Mala crying at the kitchen table. Vladek has been making her miserable again; she complains about his stinginess, telling Artie that he refuses to give her money for even small personal expenses. She remembers how, right after they were married, Vladek tried to force her to wear Anja’s old clothes rather than buying anything new. Artie wonders whether it was the war that made Vladek so painfully frugal, but Mala reminds him that she went through the camps herself, as did all their friends, and none of them are like Vladek. Artie tells Mala that Vladek’s miserly character is one of the things he is most anxious about in drawing his book. Vladek resembles racist stereotypes about Jews that many people still believe, and while Artie wants to create an accurate portrait of his father, he feels conflicted about depicting all the negative aspects of Vladek’s character.

Vladek comes in from watering the garden. Artie, changing the subject quickly, tells Vladek that he has begun sketching pages for his book, and takes drafts out of his bag from the scene where Vladek describes the hanging of the four Jews in Sosnowiec. The scene makes Vladek tearful. He and Mala both praise the work. Vladek tells Artie he will be as famous as “the big-shot cartoonist” – he has forgotten the name of Walt Disney. The atmosphere is pleasant until Mala remarks that she has an appointment with her hairdresser. Vladek makes a derisive comment about how often Mala visits the hairdresser, and the two of them begin to fight. Artie shepherds Vladek into the garden, away from the conflict. As he and Vladek settle into lawn chairs, he suggests that Vladek and Mala might benefit from seeing a marriage counselor to help them learn to get along better. Vladek brushes off the suggestion. Mala doesn’t care about getting along, he says – she only wants his money.

Artie asks Vladek to resume his story in 1944, when he and Anja left Srodula. Vladek talks: The two of them walk toward Sosnowiec under the cover of dark, but don’t know what they will do once they get there – they need to hide, but don’t know where to go. On the outskirts of town, they recognize the house where Janina, Richieu’s former governess, lives. Janina opens the door, and looks terrified as she recognizes the Spiegelmans. She tells them to get away from her house, saying they’ll only bring trouble.

Desperate to get off the streets before dawn, when they are likely to be recognized as Jews, Anja and Vladek walk toward the house where the Zylberberg family lived before the war. Mr. Lukowski, the janitor, still lives in the house. He ushers Anja and Vladek into a shed in the courtyard. Anja is relieved to find that “there are still some kind people left.” Mr. Lukowski tells them they must find a better place to hide soon –one of the neighbors will surely recognize them otherwise.

That day, Vladek goes into the city. He wants to get a feel for conditions, though Anja is fearful of what might happen to him. As when he convinced the train conductor to smuggle him across the border, he wears a pig mask over his mouse head to indicate that he is pretending to be Polish. As he walks down the street, Vladek becomes aware of someone following him. A man speaks to him in Hebrew, asking whether Vladek is a Jew. Vladek hesitates, but he answers in Hebrew. The man is pleased – he is a Jew himself, he tells Vladek. He turns in profile, and the strings of a mask can be seen holding his pig’s face in place. The Jewish man tells Vladek he can find food and information about a place to hide on Dekerta Street. Vladek goes to Dekerta Street immediately, where he finds a woman selling black-market food. He buys an armful of eggs, sausage, and other luxurious foods, and takes them back to an amazed Anja.

Vladek returns to Dekerta Street, where he learns of a farmer named Mrs. Kawka who, some of the young men suggest, might be willing to hide him and Anja in exchange for payment. Vladek and Anja move into Mrs. Kawka’s barn, but Vladek soon begins looking for a warmer place where they can spend the winter. He goes to Dekerta Street often – much to Anja’s dismay, since she fears for his life each time he leaves – and becomes friendly with a Polish woman, Mrs. Motonowa, who sells black-market food. She knows about Vladek and Anja’s difficult living situation, and one day offers to have them move into her house with her and her young son. Vladek gratefully accepts, and the next evening, Mrs. Motonowa and her son escort Vladek and Anja from the barn on Mrs. Kawka’s farm to their house in Szopienice.

Mrs. Motonowa’s house is more comfortable than the barn at Mrs. Kawka’s farm. Mrs. Motonowa is a good woman, though she is exacting when it comes to her payments – Vladek pays her both for sheltering them and for bringing them food from her black market business. Her little boy loves Anja, who plays games with him and tutors him in German. Things in the house are relatively peaceful until one morning, when the Gestapo (the Nazi police) search Mrs. Motonowa and confiscate her goods while she is selling black market food in Dekerta Street. She runs home and tells the Spiegelmans they have to leave immediately, in case the Gestapo come to search her house.

Cast out with nowhere to go, knowing it is dangerous for them to be on the streets after dark, Vladek and Anja spend the night hiding in a construction site. In the morning, they return to Mrs. Kawka’s barn – the only place they can think to go. Mrs. Kawka, who has always been severe in her attitude toward the couple, softens when she sees Anja shivering and exhausted. She invites Anja to warm up in her house, and brings Vladek food. Vladek tells Mrs. Kawka he would do anything to get out of Poland. Mrs. Kawka tells him about two people she knows who have been working as smugglers, taking people to Hungary – they took two of her previous Jewish borders, she says, with good results. Vladek, who is clearly very excited by this news, tells her he’d like to meet the smugglers.

Artie stops Vladek, and asks whether Hungary wasn’t just as dangerous as Poland. For a long time, Vladek says, Hungary was safer. Near the end of the war, the situation would become truly horrible for Hungarian Jews – Vladek remembers hundreds of thousands of them coming into Auschwitz while he was there – but he had now way of knowing that when he decided to try escaping to Hungary. Vladek looks deeply sad as he talks about this, then quickly resumes his story.

Just a day or two after Mrs. Motonowa forces Vladek and Anja to leave her house, Vladek meets her again in Dekerta Street. She greets him warmly, apologizing for the panicked state in which she sent them away. The Gestapo never came to her house after all, she tells him, and he and Anja would be welcome to move in with her again. The couple return to Szopienice that same night. Soon, though, Mrs. Motonowa’s husband, who works in Germany, returns home for a visit. Mrs. Motonowa hides the Spiegelmans in her cellar for the ten days her husband is home, knowing he would throw her out of the house if he discovered she was harboring Jews. There are rats in the cellar, which frighten Anja, but they cannot do anything about it –they must wait for the husband’s visit to pass.

Mrs. Motonowa allows them back into the house after her husband returns to Germany, but Vladek has begun to feel that they are not safe with her. He wants to get to Hungary. After Mr. Motonowa leaves, he goes back to Mrs. Kawka’s farm to meet with the smugglers. There, he encounters three other people hoping to escape to Hungary: Mr. Mandelbaum, an old acquaintance of the Spiegelmans who once owned a sweets shop in Sosnowiec; his wife; and his nephew, Abraham. The four of them talk with the smugglers together, then confer about their options, speaking in Yiddish so the Polish smugglers won’t understand. Vladek is not sure whether the men can be trusted. Abraham volunteers to go with the smugglers first, then write to his uncle if everything is safe.

Back at Mrs. Motonowa’s house, Anja insists she will never go with the smugglers to Hungary. They are safe with Mrs. Motonowa, she says, sobbing in terror –leaving is too dangerous. Mrs. Motonowa begs Vladek to reconsider as well, but he refuses to budge. He tells Anja that he wants to be able to walk the streets as a free man; he wants to be treated like a human being.

Vladek goes to visit his cousin, Miloch. He has never seen Miloch’s hiding place, but hopes to help Miloch and his family by putting them in contact with Mrs. Motonowa, so they can take Vladek and Anja’s place in the house if they leave for Hungary. When he arrives at the house where Miloch and his family are staying, he is shocked by the conditions: their bunker is a small, freezing-cold crawlspace behind a garbage pit. Even worse, it is clear to Vladek that people know the family is hiding there. He tells Miloch about his situation at Mrs. Motonowa’s, and promises to be in touch when he knows whether he’s going to Hungary.

A few days later, the smugglers return with a letter from Abraham. The letter says he is safe and happy in Hungary, and urges them to follow him soon. Vladek and Mandelbaum make arrangements to leave in two days’ time. Anja is terrified – she is convinced the smugglers have arranged some kind of trick, and begs Vladek to call everything off – but Vladek insists, and eventually, Anja relents. Vladek visits Miloch and tells him to move into Mrs. Motonowa’s house. In an aside to Artie, he remarks that Miloch and his family spent the remainder of the war in Mrs. Motonowa’s house, perfectly safe. He and Anja, though, had something else entirely in their future.

Two days later, Vladek and Anja board a train, along with Mandelbaum, his wife, and the smugglers. They are barely on the train for an hour – just passing by Bielsko, where Vladek once had his textile factory – when the Gestapo board the train and arrest them. The smugglers have double-crossed them, and delivered them into the hands of the Nazis.

The Spiegelmans and the Mandelbaums are marched to a prison in Bielsko, where the men are separated from their wives and thrown into a cell with a few others. They spend several days there. Vladek helps a Polish man write letters to his family –prisoners are only permitted to write letters in German. When the man’s family sends him a parcel full of food, he gives some to Vladek as payment. A few days later, the Germans load dozens of prisoners onto a truck, and Vladek and Anja are reunited. Though Anja insists she isn’t hungry, Vladek forces her to take some of the food the Polish man paid him with, which he has been saving for her.

The truck takes Vladek, Anja, and the Mandelbaums to Auschwitz. It is now 1944, and every Jew in Poland knows about the gas chambers where Jews are killed en masse, and the ovens where the piles of bodies are burned. Even as they entered through the gates of Auschwitz, Vladek says, the prisoners understood that they would not leave alive. As the prisoners file out of the truck, the Nazis push men into one line, and women into another. Vladek and Anja are separated, unsure of whether they will ever see one another alive again.

Artie asks Vladek to come inside with him and search for Anja’s diaries. Vladek hesitates, then confesses to Artie that he has finally remembered what happened to the diaries. After Anja died, he says, he had a “very bad day” and felt overwhelmed by memories of her and of the war. In an attempt to “make an order with everything,” he burned many of Anja’s things – her diaries among them. Artie is stunned, then enraged. He screams at Vladek, cursing him and calling him a “murderer.” His anger upsets Vladek, who tries to explain that his depression after Anja died made it difficult to think straight. He is clearly hurt by the things Artie has said, and Artie backs down from his shouting. He apologizes to Vladek, but makes excuses to leave the house as quickly as possible. As he walks away, he grumbles the word “murderer.”