	When discussing Maus and guilt as compared to Survival in Auschwitz You must take into consideration that Vladek's story is told in the 70's and later giving more time for Vladek to reflect upon his life and for things to change, than Primo Levi had as Survival in Auschwitz  was first published in 1947. We have a more abundant  sense of guilt throughout Maus, though rarely explicitly. There is a major section that deals with survivors guilt while Art is discussing his father with his therapist, with the therapist suggesting that his fathers behavior comes from the fact that “[Vladek] needed to show that he was always right-that he could always SURVIVE-because he felt GUILTY about surviving.” Viewing this with the lens of the stories that Vladek tells we can see a man who loses nearly everything and survives the Holocaust due to a lot of  luck and some skill, coming out of it and seeing himself as someone who survived and therefore he needed to be the best, otherwise all of his struggles in retrospect seem for naught. Guilt is also passed over to Art himself as even though is father can be insufferable he can empathize and understand some of the reasons that Vladek is the way he is. This leads him to be guilty about the way he treats his father, he ignores him, he disregards his complaints, and disparages him for his cheap ways. This leads to a more crushing sense of guilt as the more of Vladek's story is told. The book culminates on a line delivered by Vladek that seems to be both heart wrenching and exemplifies both the themes of family and guilt that the book plays so heavily upon. Nearing the end of the entire story Vladek tells Art that after being reunited with Anja that the two of them were “both very happy and lived happy, happy ever after.” Followed by telling Art “so... let's stop, please, your tape recorder... I'm tired from talking, Richieu, and it's enough stories for now...” This shows us Vladek at his weakest, a man torn up inside over the retelling of the hardest part of his life. We see the odd ties of family come up again as in some way he refers to Art as Richieu, an odd statement that is both sweet and stinging.
	Primo Levi's Survival in Auschwitz primarily deals with what it means to be human, questioning what you can do to a man before he loses his humanity and just becomes a lifeless shell, the living dead, a musselman. This is illustrated in the original title of the book If This IS A Man showing a questioning sense if one who went through what he went, survivor or not, is really a man throughout all of it. The degradation of humanity that happened during the Holocaust are even so much as laid out in a poem in the introduction  “Consider if this is a man Who works in the mud Who does not know peace Who fights for a scrap of bread Who dies because of a yes or a no.”, this shows what has been done and the rest of the poem addresses the reader to consider if these actions committed upon man allow him to keep his humanity, and to spread these stories on to the next generation or one should be cursed. At times the conditions of the camps change men beyond drastically, they become “hunger” or “fear”, they lose grasp on their humanity due to what is done. Even mores o you get to the point where people become practically nothing, one of the first people discussed is Null Achtzehn. “He is not called anything except that, Zero Eighteen, […] Null Achtzehn is no longer a man.” Eventually you reach a point where it seems that death is both inevitable and random, then one loses everything in anticipation of oblivion.
