Few are unacquainted with the atrocities of the holocaust, and while the first two chapters of Maus took place in the years leading up to Germany’s ’39 invasion of Poland the reader feels a mounting sense of tension: the arrest of the neighbor for holding communist propaganda, the looting of Vladek’s factory in his absence, yet none of these events are as vivid or iconic as the scene in which Vladek and his extended family look from the train window at the Nazi flag (p. 32). Here, common symbols, imagery and tension converge. The reader now recognizes the holocaust, and feels (despite the characters being portrayed as mice) a sense of sympathy for the family and familiarity with the historical connotations of the swastika.