As conservatives across the country work to ban books, Holocaust education is suffering.

Recently, right-wing extremists have largely targeted books with LGBTQ+ and racial themes, claiming that the topics are not appropriate for young children. Even distinctly nonsexual, historical narratives have been pulled over "inappropriate" content, restricting the subjects students can learn.

Two of the books at the heart of these efforts is Art Spiegelman's Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novels, Maus. As the true story of Holocaust survivors and victims — Spiegelman's family — the books do not shy away from the real horrors faced by Jewish people and other minorities in Nazi Germany.

Several school districts across the country have removed Maus over its hard-hitting content. Officials in Missouri are currently debating whether or not to allow the book in schools, as a new state law criminalizes those who provide minors with "sexually explicit material."

Spiegelman has said that he believes the pretenses his books are being banned under to be absurd — yet reflective of an alarming trend sweeping the nation.

“It’s one more book — just throw it on the bonfire,” Spiegelman recently told The Washington Post. “It’s a real warning sign of a country that’s yearning for a return of authoritarianism."

Maus depicts the story of Spiegelman's parents during and after the Holocaust. Through its illustrations, it depicts Jewish people as mice and Nazis as cats. There are some graphic images in the novel, including one scene depicting his mother's suicide where she was naked in a bathtub. This is one of the scenes cited in challenges of the book.

“She was sitting in a pool of blood when my father found her,” Spiegelman said, noting that it is a “rather unsexy image seen from above,” and “not something I think anybody could describe as a nude woman. She’s a naked corpse.”

Missouri's law includes exemptions for work deemed to be “serious” or hold cultural “significance.” However, the vague nature of the law — and similar legislation in other states — prompt many officials to protect themselves instead of information.

Spiegelman said he does not believe that his work is inappropriate, and that those who have removed Maus made their decisions based on their own subjective definitions of work that holds "significance."

“It was the other things making them uncomfortable, like genocide,” he continued. “I just tried to make them clean and understandable, which is the purpose of storytelling with pictures.”

To Spiegelman, Maus is about "othering" and "dehumanizing people," and that "those others can include Asians, Indigenous Americans, Black people, Muslims — not to mention LGBTQ and beyond."

Opposite to that, he believes book bans are “about squelching what’s supposed to happen in school, which is an education that allows people to become one country that can talk to each other with a base of knowledge.”