The untold Australian story of Maus

The untold Australian story of Maus

Tuesday 21 May | 6.45pm – 7.45pm

Join us for this special event at the Museum, part of the official Sydney Writers’ Festival.

For decades, Holocaust survivor Mark Spigelman had recurring nightmares. These took the shape of fragmented memories from his childhood during the Holocaust: from imprisonment in a Polish ghetto, to time spent hiding in a bunker, rubbish tips and a farmhouse.

Mark’s memories were mostly limited to traumatic dreams, until 1980, when his brother stumbled upon the Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel, Maus. When Mark picked up the book, he discovered many of the same vivid images from his nightmares on its pages. This was no coincidence. Maus was his family’s story; and the author, Art Spiegelman, his long-lost cousin.

In this fascinating conversation between Mark and Museum Educator Lee-Anne Whitten, learn how a graphic novel helped Mark piece together his nightmares to better understand his family history.

Professor Mark Spigelman was born in Poland in 1940. He is a retired Sydney surgeon, medical archaeologist and a child survivor of the Holocaust. The Spigelman family, who arrived in Sydney as refugees, would go on to make a large impact in science, medicine, law, and the nation’s human rights landscape.