Trains

For many people, the word train brings to mind their childhood spent playing with trains, watching Thomas the Tank Engine, and that Trolley in Mister Rogers' Neighborhood. Trains are an integral part of society; they transport vast amounts of shtuff that we buy and use in our daily lives. In Maus however, Art Spiegelman uses the motif of trains to represent the Jews' eventual destination in a concentration camp. The trains are drawn to look ominous and foreboding to further the motif. This is perhaps Art's way of differentiating between a survivor's mental image of trains versus the mental image of your average citizen. A survivor of the Holocaust certainly would remember the trains that took away their friends and family. They probably wouldn't think of trains as childhood icons or transporters of goods. In the mind of a Holocaust survivor, trains invoke memories of cramped spaces, and the black smoke drifting from the smokestack.