The Shape of the Oppressed

On page 90 of Spiegelman's work, Vladek narrates the scene in which 25,000 the Jews in Sosnowiec come to the stadium to get their passports stamped. The way Art depicts this scene is chaotic as a result of Nazi demands, and therefore it supports his argument that the Nazis systematically erased the identity of Jews. Each individual figure is a Jew, but Art draws them out as indiscernible rudimentary scribbles. Through Art's narrative, the reader is told that every single person in the crowd is a "Jew of Sosnowiec", and is also told that "everyone came very nice dressed", but once a second look at the image is taken, you can see that you can't see any of what he was describing (Page 89-90). You can't even see the general mice shaped bodies that represented Jews, let alone the nice clothes they purposely dressed in to get their passports stamped. As a result of the Nazis gaining political power, the Jews in Sosnowiec begin to worry and frantically try to survive. For this reason, Art shows the figures as unidentifiable moving blurs, scrambling to get their passports stamped, rather than individual independent mice. Aside from the imagery within the crowd, he also purposely positions a Nazi flag amid the crowd of people to show the root of all the chaos as well as insinuate that the political influence of the Nazis is increasing. The combination of the mass chaos within the crowd of formless Jews and the single wavering Nazi flag contributes to Art's underlying message that the Jews were losing their identities to Nazis.