On Mother and Fatherland

[W]e may regard this as the Polish version of Art Spiegelman's Maus-in its form, an excellent and utterly unexpected version. Such a comparison is not about imitation, nor about formal similarity, but about something essential for both authors: the child-artist's struggle with the historical experience represented by the parent. A struggle for one's own identity, for the right to one's own life, for a way out of the mausoleum of the Holocaust. A struggle played out in the arena of art.-Przemyslaw Czaplinski