Maus
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50 free Maus trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Maus is the book that proved a comic could carry the weight of history. Over two volumes, Art Spiegelman records his father Vladek's account of life as a Polish Jew before, during and after the Holocaust, and sets it against their own difficult relationship decades later in the United States. It is taught in schools around the world and still starts arguments about how such a story should be told. This quiz covers both parts, My Father Bleeds History and And Here My Troubles Began. Expect questions on Vladek and Anja's courtship and marriage, the ghettos and hiding places of Sosnowiec, Auschwitz and the long road home, as well as the present-day scenes with Art, Mala and Françoise. A handful look at the animal symbolism, the way the book was made and how it was received. It works as a reading check for Maus I, Maus II or the complete edition, as revision before a test, or simply as a way to see how much of the story stayed with you. Every answer comes with a short explanation.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In Maus, where Art Spiegelman draws Jewish characters as mice, which animal represents the Germans who hunt them?
Cats
Cats let Spiegelman turn the Nazis' own vermin propaganda into a predator-and-prey picture. He drew them no bigger than the mice, leaving readers to make their own moral judgments.
Q 02Art Spiegelman's Maus was the first graphic novel ever to win which major US honor, given as a special award?
Pulitzer Prize
The Pulitzer Prize went to Maus as a special award in 1992, sidestepping the argument over which category it belonged in. Critics could not agree whether it was memoir, history or biography.
Q 03In Maus, what did Vladek do with the notebooks in which his late wife Anja wrote down her wartime story?
Burned them
Burned them, he admits, on a day after her death when the memories were too much. All he recalls of the pages is her wish that her son would one day be interested in them.
Q 04Which 1980s sticker-card craze did Maus creator Art Spiegelman co-create in his day job at Topps?
Garbage Pail Kids
Garbage Pail Kids came out of the Topps job that was Spiegelman's main income for two decades, including his first years on Maus. He also co-created Wacky Packages there.
Q 05A school board in which US state voted in 2022 to pull Maus from its curriculum, sending sales soaring?
Tennessee
Tennessee's McMinn County board objected to profanity, violence and nudity in the book. Within days of the news Maus was the best-selling book on Amazon, and Spiegelman called the vote "Orwellian".
Q 06In Maus, what do Jewish characters tie over their faces when they try to pass as non-Jewish Poles?
Pig masks
Pig masks, with the strings showing at the back, mark a mouse passing as a Pole. Anja's disguise is drawn as less convincing than Vladek's, since she could not pass as easily.
Q 07Art Spiegelman believed which 1986 animated film from Steven Spielberg's company had borrowed its idea from Maus?
An American Tail
An American Tail reached cinemas three months after the first Maus volume, to Spiegelman's relief. He wanted his book out first so that it would not be compared with the cartoon.
Q 08In Maus, which skill makes a kapo protect Vladek and feed him well during his first months in Auschwitz?
Teaching English
Teaching English to his kapo earned Vladek a table full of food and a uniform that fit. He even came away with a belt, a spoon and shoes for a friend whose trousers kept slipping down.
Q 09Maus II opens with a 1930s German newspaper quote attacking which cartoon star as a filthy carrier of bacteria?
Mickey Mouse
Mickey Mouse was "the most miserable ideal ever revealed", the article raged, urging young Germans to wear the swastika instead. Spiegelman traced his mouse symbol for Jews to propaganda of this kind.
Q 10In Maus II, which animal does Art consider for his French wife Françoise before settling on a mouse?
A frog
A frog was one idea on Art's sketchpad, along with a moose and a rabbit. Françoise insists on being a mouse too, pointing out that she converted to Judaism.
Q 11In the prologue of Maus, young Art's friends leave him behind after he falls while doing what?
Roller-skating
Roller-skating home in tears, Art gets no comfort from Vladek: "If you lock them together in a room with no food for a week, then you could see what it is, friends!"
Q 12In Maus, which piece of home fitness equipment does Vladek use while he first tells Art about his youth in Poland?
An exercise bike
An exercise bike is where Vladek starts his story, pedalling as he talks. In a later chapter he stays on it so long that he grows dizzy and has to lie down.
Q 13In Maus, which former girlfriend of Vladek's sends Anja a letter claiming he only wants her family's wealth?
Lucia
Q 21In Maus, where must all the Jews of Sosnowiec report for a 'registration' that sends thousands to their deaths?
The stadium
The stadium held perhaps 30,000 people, sorted left or right at tables. Vladek's father was sent to the safe side, then slipped across to stay with his daughter and her four children.
Q 22In Maus, what happens to Nahum Cohn, Vladek's trading partner, after he is caught selling goods without coupons?
Hanged in public
Hanged in public with his son, he was left on display for days as a warning to other traders. Vladek had often done business with him and was too frightened to go outside.
Q 23In Maus, Vladek builds an attic hiding place in the Srodula ghetto that can be entered only through what?
Lucia had dated Vladek for years and begged him to take her back once he was engaged. Her letter stopped Anja's phone calls until he travelled to Sosnowiec to explain himself.
Q 14In Maus, what does the factory owned by Anja's father, which made the Zylberberg family rich, produce?
Hosiery
Hosiery paid for the Zylberbergs' comfortable life, and marrying Anja brought Vladek a share of the business. German overseers later took over every Jewish-owned firm, leaving the family to live on savings.
Q 15In Maus, what had newlywed Anja secretly been passing along that got her seamstress neighbor arrested instead?
Communist messages
Communist messages from an old boyfriend in Warsaw were what Anja relayed and then hid next door. The neighbor spent three months in jail, and Vladek made Anja promise to stop.
Q 16In Maus, in which country is the costly sanitarium where Anja spends three months after Richieu's birth?
Czechoslovakia
Czechoslovakia gave the couple their first glimpse of what was coming: from the train they saw swastika flags flying in town centres. Anja came home from the sanitarium much better.
Q 17As a Polish soldier in Maus, Vladek fires at what seemingly moving object, which turns out to hide a German?
A tree
A tree was really a German soldier using branches for cover, and Vladek kept shooting until the man was dead. Soon captured himself, he had to carry that same body back for burial.
Q 18In Maus, Vladek dreams that his grandfather promises his release from a POW camp on which Jewish occasion?
Parshas Truma
Parshas Truma arrived three months later and Vladek was freed, just as the dream foretold. He had married Anja during that same week of the year, and Art would later be born in it.
Q 19In Maus, which of Art's belongings does Vladek throw out behind his back, judging it too shabby for his son?
His coat
His coat went out with the trash, a startling move from a man who never throws anything away. Vladek wanted his son better dressed and meant to replace it.
Q 20In Maus, how did Vladek's father try to make him fail the Polish army medical exam at twenty-one?
Starved him
Starved him and kept him from sleeping, so that he would be too weak to pass. It worked for one year only: Vladek begged not to go through it again and joined the army the next.
A chandelier
A chandelier hid the way up to the attic bunker, his second after one beneath a coal bin. The family was given away soon after they caught a stranger nearby and let him go out of pity.
Q 24In Maus, how does Anja's sister Tosha keep Richieu and the other children in her care from the gas chambers?
She poisons them
She poisons them and herself as the Zawiercie ghetto is emptied. Vladek and Anja had sent Richieu there believing it safer, and learned of his death only much later.
Q 25In Maus, which cousin of Vladek's, a chief of the Jewish Police, gets him out of a holding compound for a bribe?
Haskel
Haskel took the family's valuables and freed Vladek and Anja, but left her parents to be deported. He kept in with the Germans by losing to them at poker on purpose every week.
Q 26In Maus, what was accidentally baked into the cake Pesach sold in the ghetto, sickening everyone who ate it?
Laundry soap
Laundry soap had gone in with the flour by mistake. Pesach, one of Vladek's scheming cousins, made a great deal of money on the cake before his customers fell ill.
Q 27In Maus, which black-market grocer hides Vladek and Anja in her home, then in her cellar when her husband visits?
Mrs. Motonowa
Mrs. Motonowa charged for her hospitality but was kind, and took the couple back after once throwing them out in a panic. They spent ten days among the rats while her husband was home.
Q 28In Maus, what happens when Vladek and Anja board a train with smugglers who promised a route to Hungary?
The Gestapo arrest them
The Gestapo arrest them: the smugglers had sold them out. The letter saying the route was safe had been written at gunpoint by a man who went ahead of them.
Q 29In Maus, what does Art call Vladek at the end of the first volume after learning Anja's diaries are gone?
Murderer
Murderer is the word Art throws at his father, because the lost pages were his mother's own voice. They held the only record of what happened to her after the couple were separated.
Q 30Which earlier Art Spiegelman comic about his mother's suicide, drawn with human faces, is reprinted in Maus?
Prisoner on the Hell Planet
Prisoner on the Hell Planet upsets Vladek when he comes across a copy years later. Its harsh, woodcut-like style breaks with the animal heads drawn everywhere else in the book.