Art Spiegelman explains his choice to depict Jews as mice and Nazis as cats:
As I began to do more detailed and more finely grained research for the longer Maus project, I found how regularly Jews were represented literally as rats. Caricatures by Fips (the pen name of Philippe Rupprecht) filled the pages of Der Stürmer; grubby, swarthy, Jewish apelike creatures in one drawing, ratlike creatures in the next. Posters of killing the vermin and making them flee were part of the overarching metaphor. It’s amazing how often the image still comes up in anti-Semitic cartoons in Arab countries today.
Marc Tracy lauds Spiegelman's newly-released companion to his great graphic novel:
The best thing on MetaMaus I’ve read so far comes, unsurprisingly, from The New Republic’s Ruth Franklin, author of a fine study whose primary insistence is that a myopic obsession with getting the actual facts of specific Holocaust stories exactly right frequently gets in the way of appreciating the artful depictions of larger, more important, sometimes detail-immune truths about the overall event. (I wrote about Franklin’s book last year.) "What MetaMaus makes clear," Franklin argues, "is that Maus, like the works of W.G. Sebald, exists somewhere outside of the genres as they are normally defined: We might call it ‘testimonially based Holocaust representation.’ But no matter what it is called, it gives the lie to the critics of Holocaust literature (as well as certain writers of it) who have insisted that either everything must be true or nothing is true."
The Dish 