	Both Art Spiegelman's Maus and Primo Levi's Survival in Auschwitz tackle surviving concentration camps near the end of World War Two, though both men whose stories are told were in the same camps around the same time period, the themes that come across vary. Ranging from the embittered sense of family in Maus to the primal understanding of what it means to be human in Levi's work, both works sharing some general themes but exploring deeper concepts relevant to each case. With this knowledge in hand, the ways that each novel explores events within the story and how those events impacted people can be analyzed to gain a deeper understanding of the work as a whole.
	While Both books tackle themes such as power and race Maus uniquely deals with those of guilt and family more than Survival in Auschwitz. The telling of Vladek's story by his son Art inherently makes the story a different beast to look at, as even though we get the story from what we see as directly Vladek, it is filtered through the eyes and pen of his son. Their father son relationship is a major contention point amongst the themes of family as it dominates the book and can be seen as THE major theme and something that overshadows Vladek's story as well. Art' relationship with his father is strained to say the least, as Vladek is an overbearing man who not only projects his own worries and neuroses on to others but also but rejects outside assistance. This leads to constant conflict while Art is trying to preserve his fathers story. The father son dynamic is skewed against the son in favor of a domineering father, one who has the power to control his sons actions on many levels. The father son relationship is further thrown off course by the story of Richieu we have within the novel, Vladek and Anja's first son Richieu is killed during the war and the specter of his short life and death hangs over both Vladek through his life and Art as hes working on Maus. It's discussed directly by Art in the novel that having an older brother that will never make mistakes or be a disappointment makes for a heavy burden to bear growing up. Even more so within the realm of family you have Art's mother Anja, we have limited information as she committed suicide before the modern events of the book, but we do know some things about her. Firstly we have a good amount of what happened to her during the war and secondly we know her suicide affected both Art and Vladek heavily. Anja's suicide affecting Art is another major facet of the story as it's clear that he places the blame for her death somewhere between himself, his father, and the war. We see in”Prisoner on the Hell Planet” the events surrounding her suicide and how it hurt Art, and we can see how Vladek treats Mala as an extension of the loss of his wife. Thus far we've only discussed Art's direct family, when you talk about the concepts of family in Maus you can look even deeper at Vladek's family and how the loss of the vast majority of his family changed him. This plays into the other major theme of guilt that Maus seems to explore.
