";s:4:"text";s:3473:" This was a horrible time in Birkenau – 1944, when hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews were being transported to the camp. They have a two-bedroom apartment and a Polish nurse. As he walks through the camp, he calls out Anja… When the police arrived, they found the package and arrested the neighbor. This incident with the pills is just one example; Art's childhood was likely filled with similar situations.In 1939, Vladek receives a letter from the government drafting him into the army. Everything was taken, though Vladek does not think that there were any anti-Semitic motives. He will not live through the war. With his money he lives a comfortable lifestyle with his wife Anja. He is sent west, to the German front.Anja's father gives Vladek a factory to provide for his daughter and what he hopes will soon be their family. Vladek understood her sickness, so whenever she would get worked up he always helped her calm down. The sanitarium is beautiful, and Vladek takes good care of his ailing wife. Spiegelman shows this Jewishness by having her tail hang out of her disguise.
Soon after giving birth Anja becomes terribly depressed, and Vladek takes her to an upscale sanitarium in Czechoslovakia. They heard about someone's cousin, who lived in Germany, had to sell his business to a German and then he was run out of the country with no money. Their first child, Richieu, is born in 1937.
Within a few months, though, they set up another factory, and soon things are again going well. Anja comments that, "when it comes to the Jews, the Poles don't need much stirring up."
Their first child, Richieu, is born in 1937. Doctor-prescribed medication for these two ailments together totals seven pills, yet Vladek takes about thirty pills every day, the remaining pills comprised of various vitamins that he has read about in his "prevention magazines." As an explanation, he tells Art that "I must fight to save myself." This determination recalls his fight for survival during the Holocaust, another example of how the Holocaust, though forty years in the past, continues to have an effect on Vladek's personality and actions.Before Vladek and Anja met, she had one other boyfriend, a Communist from Warsaw. Vladek is the one, for example, who convinces Anja to keep living when she wants to kill herself on learning the death of their son. Or maybe the reason why they can’t have a relationship. Vladek Returns to Sosnowiec Vladek is reunited with his family after sneaking across the Poland-Germany Border.