Arena Season 1, Episode 319

Of Cats and Mice · BBC Four · Friday, December 18

Art Spiegelman is one of America's leading comic-strip artists. Earlier this year he created a stir with Maus, a novel in strip form. Maus tells of a young Jewish couple who are arrested and transported to Auschwitz - where Spiegelman's parents endured and survived the war. The Jews are depicted as mice and the SS guards as cats. The story is told by an elderly mouse to his young son who asks him about his life. The unlikely, perhaps provocative, form of the comic-strip has produced an extremely moving book which has had huge success on both sides of the Atlantic. Tonight's film follows Spiegelman's journey with his wife and child to Auschwitz for the first time.