WASHINGTON (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 28th January, 2022) A school board in the US state of Tennessee is being criticized on International Holocaust Remembrance Day by the author of the graphic novel "Maus" and by others for its decision to remove the Holocaust-centered book from its eighth-grade curriculum, CNBC said on Thursday in a report and interview with the author.
"I'm kind of baffled by this," author Art Spiegelman said, calling the school board's decision "Orwellian."
Spiegelman's graphic novel was removed from the curriculum by the McMinn County School Board on January 10 in a unanimous vote due to concerns about the book's use of profanity and its depiction of female nudity.
"Maus" depicts events surrounding Nazi Germany and the Holocaust using anthropomorphized animals to depict various groups of people, including Jews as mice, Poles as pigs and Germans as cats. It is based on Spiegalman's talks with his own father, who was a Holocaust survivor, and won a 1992 Pulitzer prize.
Russian stores in 2015 began removing the book from the shelves due to its use of Nazi imagery, including the swastika, which could violate Russian laws banning Nazi propaganda.
At the time, Spiegelman said banning his book is a real shame because it is a book about memory and "we don't want cultures to erase memory."
Earlier on Thursday, US President Joe Biden said in a statement that schools must teach the Holocaust accurately and push back against attempts to ignore, deny, distort and revise history.
Holocaust Remembrance Day is celebrated on January 27 - the day upon which the Soviet Red Army in 1945 liberated the Auschwitz concentration camp in occupied Poland, which became one of the main symbols of the Holocaust due to the large number of people killed there by the Nazis between 1941 and 1945.
