page_title: Art Spiegelman
section_title: Family history
hierarchical_section_title: Art Spiegelman / Family history
caption_attribution_description: English: The Sosnowiec Ghetto set up in World War II by Nazi German authorities for Polish Jews in the Province of Upper Silesia during the Holocaust was liquidated during Aktionen lasting from June until August 1943.Polski: Likwidacja getta w Sosnowcu podczas Drugiej Wojny, deportacje do Niemieckiego obozu zaglady KL Auschwitz w 1943 roku. Source: [1] Yad Vashem archives.
context_page_description: Art Spiegelman is an American cartoonist, editor, and comics advocate best known for his graphic novel Maus. His work as co-editor on the comics magazines Arcade and Raw has been influential, and from 1992 he spent a decade as contributing artist for The New Yorker. He is married to designer and editor Françoise Mouly and is the father of writer Nadja Spiegelman.
  Spiegelman began his career with the Topps bubblegum card company in the mid-1960s, which was his main financial support for two decades; there he co-created parodic series such as Wacky Packages in the 1960s and the Garbage Pail Kids in the 1980s. He gained prominence in the underground comix scene in the 1970s with short, experimental, and often autobiographical work. A selection of these strips appeared in the collection Breakdowns in 1977, after which Spiegelman turned focus to the book-length Maus, about his relationship with his father, a Holocaust survivor. The postmodern book depicts Germans as cats, Jews as mice, and ethnic Poles as pigs, and took 13 years to create until its completion in 1991.
context_section_description: Art Spiegelman's parents were Polish Jews Władysław (1906–1982) and Andzia (1912–1968) Spiegelman.  His father was born Zeev Spiegelman, with the Hebrew name Zeev ben Avraham. Władysław was his Polish name, and Władek (or Vladek in Russified form) was a diminutive of this name. He was also known as Wilhelm under the German occupation, and upon immigration to the United States he took the name William. His mother was born Andzia Zylberberg, with the Hebrew name Hannah. She took the name Anna upon her immigration to the US. In Spiegelman's Maus, from which the couple are best known, Spiegelman used the spellings "Vladek" and "Anja", which he believed would be easier for Americans to pronounce.  The surname Spiegelman is German for "mirror man".
  In 1937, the Spiegelmans had one other son, Rysio (spelled "Richieu" in Maus), who died before Art was born at the age of five or six. During the Holocaust, Spiegelman's parents sent Rysio to stay with an aunt with whom they believed he would be safe. In 1943, the aunt poisoned herself, along with Rysio and two other young family members in her care, so that the Nazis could not take them to the extermination camps. After the war, the Spiegelmans, unable to accept that Rysio was dead, searched orphanages all over Europe in the hope of finding him. Spiegelman talked of having a sort of sibling rivalry with his "ghost brother"—he felt unable to compete with an "ideal" brother who "never threw tantrums or got in any kind of trouble". Of 85 Spiegelman relatives alive at the beginning of World War II, only 13 are known to have survived the Holocaust.
caption: Liquidation at the Sosnowiec Ghetto in occupied Poland during World War II; Spiegelman tells of his parents' survival in Maus.
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