"Esther Safran Foer grew up in a family where history was too terrible to speak of. The child of parents who were each the sole survivors of their respective families, for Esther the Holocaust was always felt but never discussed. So when Esther's mother casually mentions an astonishing revelation--that her father had a previous wife and daughter, both killed in the Holocaust--Esther resolves to find the truth. Armed with only a black-and-white photo...

Continues the story of Vladek as he survives life in the concentration camps and then has to deal with life after the war. Spiegelman combines his own autobiography with his father's story as he details the difficulty in getting his father to remember things he'd rather forget.

A European orphan transplanted to New York, Doriel is shaped by the pain of the deaths of his parents following World War II and the horrors of the Holocaust, and seeks solace in an intense study of Judaism and a search for the secrets of his mother's life.