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With humor and finesse, THE HELL OF AUSCHWITZ explores Art Spiegelman's comic book masterpiece, Maus, which revolutionized how the portrayal of the Holocaust.

Published in two volumes in 1986 and 1991 respectively, Spiegelman accomplished a double revolution: he brought the Holocaust into comics and, with it, into mainstream culture, without ever betraying the historical and narrative rigor required to convey its experience. By recounting both the testimony of his father Vladek, a Polish Jew who survived Auschwitz and emigrated to New York after the war, and his difficult conversations with him, he also established comics as an art of reality. He also gave a voice to the "second generation" of children of Holocaust survivors, who were buckling under the weight of a tragedy they had not experienced directly. Yet, in 1980, when Maus first appeared in Raw, the alternative comics magazine Spiegelman ran with his wife, his undertaking was not only unprecedented, but also unthinkable: a comic about the extermination camps, depicting Jews as mice, Nazis as cats, and Polish "goys" as pigs?

First a bookstore phenomenon with a whiff of scandal, then an international bestseller awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1992, Maus nevertheless quickly became a classic. Director Pauline Horovitz, who discovered in this seminal work at the age of 13 the truth that her own family stubbornly kept from her, explores its "before" and "after" in the light of her journey as a granddaughter of survivors. (Arte France)