Vladek Spieglman is a Jewish survivor of Hitler's Europe. His son, a cartoonist, is trying to come to terms with his father’s terrifying story and history itself. The story is told in comic form where the Jews are mice, the Germans cats, the Poles pigs, the French frogs and the Americans dogs. With outside events growing ever more ominous, the novel takes the reader though Vladek’s marriage to Anna, his enlistment in the Polish army after the outbreak of hostilities, his and Anna's life in the ghetto and then their flight into hiding as the Final Solution is put into effect.