1000 students. That’s the number I estimate read Maus I and Maus II in my English classes when I was in the classroom. The recent news that a rural school board in Tennessee decided to ban Maus by Art Spiegelman struck me to the core — I’ve read the books several times myself, and yes, while the subject of the Holocaust is disturbing, it shows what happens when people are brainwashed and fed hateful propaganda over time. We begin to see each other other as less than human. Perhaps even as mice — vermin that must be eradicated.

I never received a single complaint about the books. Not one.

At the time when I used Maus in class, I was teaching in South Florida, in a high school comprised of a handful of diverse groups. There were students from the “Old Florida” lot — children of ranchers and homesteaders from long ago. Some students were recent transplants to Florida from up north, living in the nearby gated suburbs with symmetrical palm trees that ringed freshly-dug tranquil lakes. Many of my students lived in the trailer park down the road, tightly-packed single- and double-wides that housed both white and Hispanic students, united in their poverty. There was also a large contingent of students who spoke little to no English or who were getting close to exiting their language learner plans, many of whom were from Venezuela. Our school also had a sizable Jewish population.

Not a single parent or student ever complained about the book. In fact, many students said it was the most powerful book they had ever read.

Maus was my introduction to the graphic novel. It was likely the first of its type for many of my students, as well. The story is a memoir of sorts, an effort on the part of the author, Art Spiegelman, to better understand his father’s experiences in the concentration camp of Auschwitz and how those experiences impacted the rest of his life. I recall there was a lot of tension between the father and son, Art and Vladek, as Art struggled to pull parts of the story out of his father. After all, who would want to recall such terrible things? But Vladek does oblige, and the reader is provided insight, via symbolic figures of cats as Nazis, Jews as mice, and dogs as Americans.

The symbolism is apt, and students get the message: at that time in history, Jews were seen as vermin by many. The use of animals to represent groups of people is brilliant, and the graphic novel form serves students in a number of ways — while it doesn’t downplay the horrors of the Holocaust, it allows it to be told in a pictorial form, which is both engrossing and accessible for readers — including those who have low reading skills or are emerging in the understanding of English.

Students never complained about Maus — that is, unless I said time was up for silent reading, and it was time to move on to something else. Only then did they complain.

Do you have any idea how beautiful a sight it is for an English teacher to see 30-some heads bowed intently over a book, necks craned, to capture the events unfolding on the page? As a teacher, there’s nothing more gorgeous and gratifying than that.

Yes, Maus is on a difficult, mature subject. Yes, there is a bit of cursing (but then, my take on cursing is to save your “big” words for situations that warrant them — and if the Holocaust doesn’t warrant some cursing, I don’t know what does). There is nudity — in concentration camps it was customary to force Jews to shed their clothes to dehumanize them — but these aren’t photographs students are seeing, and the images on the page aren’t of people — they are of mice. The Tennessee school board that banned Maus cited a brief scene when Art’s mother, a survivor of Auschwitz, lay in a bathtub, having died by suicide. Spiegelman doesn’t dramatize or play out the event, and a reader must consider — if he didn’t share what happened to Anya, wouldn’t he be whitewashing his own family’s history?

Here’s the reason why a book like this should never be banned: every student should have a reading experience like those 1000 students whom I estimate read Maus during the early part of my teaching career. Maus was a window for them — they were able to see and understand more about the Holocaust and how a group of people, Jews, were vilified, tortured, and exterminated. They learned what can happen when people don’t speak up for others, and what blind hatred can do.

If we hadn’t read those books in class, many of those students may never have learned about the Holocaust. They might never have discussed the dangers of stereotypes. They might never have learned the importance of recognizing the slow-moving avalanche that is coming when one group has their rights stripped away, piece by piece.

Martin Niemoller was a German pastor during the rise of the Nazi party who came to see the Nazis as a harmful dictatorship seeking to strip away rights and eliminate targeted groups one by one. In a post-war speech, he said: “Then they came for me — and there was no one left to speak for me.” When students read Maus, they begin to understand how this can happen.

As a teacher, each and every time I bring any text into my classroom, I pause and reflect: what will be the benefit for students? For what purpose am I using it? What will students do with the information? And yes, is it appropriate for their maturity level? I never had a single doubt about using Maus in my classroom.

Putting a book in students’ hands is never something to be taken lightly. Books have great power — they can change minds and help us to understand people who are different from us. They can also help us to understand our shared history, shedding light on our past, yes, even the darkest parts, and help us do better in the present.

But as they say, if we don’t learn from it, history repeats itself. The banning of Maus isn’t really due to language or nudity or even the brief mention of suicide; removing the book from students’ hands allows prejudice to fester. The real reason is thinly-veiled.

In America, anti-Semitism has been a constant ugly undertow throughout our history. In recent years, we’ve witnessed this hatred coming to the surface: at the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville flags bearing swastikas were paired with symbolism of the Confederacy; in 2018, there was a mass shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh; and in January of 2022 there was a hostage situation in a synagogue in Texas, as well as vandalism of a Chicago synagogue and high school. It is clear that the tide of hate is coming in again.

The Anti-Defamation League reports a 12 percent increase in the “acts of assault, vandalism and harassment” of Jews in America from a year ago. Clearly, the need for education on the acceptance and tolerance of others is needed more than ever. And when a school board, such as the McMinn County School Board in Tennessee, decides to remove a book that has the power to educate young people on the dangers of blind hatred, it is no small act. It doesn’t take much digging to see why this particular book is being singled out, or why other books have been removed. It would be ridiculous to accept the school board’s feeble reasons for banning Maus.

Less than 100 years ago, people who espoused hatred for groups they saw as different from them hid behind white hoods while terrorizing others, silencing some who might speak up. These days, it seems as though the hoods are coming back out of the closet. And we can wonder: are the hoods now resting at the feet of some of those seated in a position of local power, tucked just out of sight beneath the table at which they sit? To look at the recent books under fire, swiftly being removed from classroom and library shelves, reads like a tale of “who we’re hating now.”

There has been a national outcry against the decision of the McMinn County School Board to ban Maus. This is good — it shows it’s not too late for us. When a book that acts as a window of understanding is removed from students’ reach, the classroom becomes a darker place. When we limit our children’s access to books and information about those who are different from us, we leave a space where a fear of otherness and those who are different can grow; we allow the weeds of division and hatred to take root once more.

Ellie Wiesel, author of Night, wrote “There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest.” We must rise up against this tide of systematic “cleansing” of our school and classroom libraries. We must speak up. If we don’t, we will never be released from this cycle of hatred, and our children will be doomed to repeat an awful history they never had the opportunity to learn about.