Honey, I Shrunk the Jews!

Through the use of perspective in page 83 of Maus, Spiegelman develops the argument that the Nazis stripped Jewish people of their individualism and viewed them as insignificant beings that were below them. The large panel at the top of the page depicts a scene where many Jews have all been rounded up so officers could verify papers and sort them,  and the panel seems to be zoomed out, at first glance to illustrate the sheer number of people present. But it also mirrors how people would view ants— tiny, uniform, and powerless. Being depicted as small itself is a sign of weakness, as in the movie ‘Honey, I Shrunk the Kids’. When the characters were small, they didn’t have any power of what was going on around them at all. They could be squashed, vacuumed, or eaten whole by a pet and they didn’t have anything to defend themselves. This mirrors how the Jews were depicted in the panel— defenseless. It also served as a reminder of how Nazis could so easily alter the course of a Jewish person’s life with the power they wielded. The bottom panels illustrate how people who got stamps on their passport were safe, and those that didn’t had an undetermined fate. The zoomed out image also reflects how cats would view mice in reality, as Nazis were depicted as cats, the predators of mice. Even though the Jewish people there were dressed in their best garments and hats, it had no effect on how Nazis viewed them and they were still seen only for their uniform trait of their ethnicity.