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A week ago it was the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz and the great and the goodly hearted were there to pay their respects, as they should have been, but in my mind there was a terrific disconnection between those plump dignitaries and the terminal awfulness of why they were all there. And there were a few survivors, they must have been liberated when they were little children. The whole event struck a discordant note.

Last year the Oscar for the best international feature film went to The Zone of Interest, which is about Auschwitz, from the point of view of Rudolf Hoss, the camp commandant, and his well-heeled family. It was a pretty good film, very chilling. You don’t get to see what goes on in the camp itself, it’s screened off by a high garden wall. But you hear the occasional gunshot and some wailing. It was based on a novel by none other than Martin Amis. Maybe I should read it.

Then there are painful memoirs of survivors like Ida Fink, Tadeusz Borowski, Primo Levi, Eli Wiesel and many others, and there are the daunting histories, 6 or 700 pages long, by Leni Yahil, Martin Gilbert, Nikolaus Wachsmann and a zillion others.

Something is missing in all of these approaches to Auschwitz. They’re all too huge, too painful, their terrible weight might easily squash you. And this is why Maus is so brilliant. With Art, we find our way gradually into this labyrinth of horror, step by step. Art Spiegelman finally gets round to sitting down with his 72 year old father, a classic cranky irritable must have things done his way annoying old buffer. Art’s there to download his life story.

(Vladek speaks in a fractured English - “Again to the hairdresser? Only a week ago you went.”��..”But I didn’t feel safe here, it was too many ways somebody could find us out. I wanted to go better to Hungary�� �� “but I must finish quick to tell you the rest because we will come soon over to the bank��)

This so personal history must have been hanging over Art’s head like a raincloud his whole life. Visit after visit, he gets Vladek to tell the whole awful story, keeps the chronology on track (old guys, they ramble) and turns it into ��. What��.a cartoon? No, a graphic novel. Well, a graphic memoir, in which the Jews are portrayed as mice, the Poles as pigs and the Germans as cats. That might be seen to be somewhat controversial, but it works well. The mice aren’t all hiding in fear from the cats, before the Nazis gradually cut them off from civilisation and hope they were stylish mice wearing nice clothes and buying new curtains and everything, just like normal people.

So we are drawn into Art’s spiky relationship with his old dad, his dad’s quarrelsome relationship with his wife, and finally, Vladek’s hair raising story of life in Poland in the 1930s. This first book takes us through the appearance of the Gestapo, the corralling of the Jews in ghettos and the transportation of Jews “for resettlement��, all the way up to the gates of Auschwitz. The second book is called And Here my Troubles Began.