This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen

Famous testimony by a Polish poet on his experiences in Auschwitz concentration camp, revealing a quite cynical view on survivors (survivors are seen as near criminals – if you would not pursue and exploit some advantage, you could not have survived the camp). And don’t we love it?

Borowski writes about the ‘Canada’ labour gang that helps unloading newly arrived trains as a kind of elite unit that is eagerly awaiting new booty. There are also some notable lessons or observations mentioned in Borowski’s tales. In one, Borowski observes that hope can be equally powerful for life (survival) as for destruction. ‘Hope (…) makes people go without a murmur to the gas chambers, keeps them from risking a revolt, (…), makes show more mothers renounce their children, or wives sell their bodies for bread…’. In another instance, Borowski comments on the role of slaves in building the edifices of civilization (pyramids and concentration camps) pointing at the complicit role of victims, but: ‘There can be no beauty if it is paid by human injustice, nor truth that passes over injustice in silence, nor moral virtue that condones it.’ Borowski is also painfully open and blunt about the reasons why some survived the camps: ‘But how did it happen that you survived? … Tell, then, how you bought places in the hospital, easy posts, how you shoved the Moslems into the oven…’. show less

A week ago I was talking to a friend about the 10-hour documentary Shoah when she gave me a link. I clicked on it. The headline read "Holocaust Study: Two-thirds of millennials don't know what Auschwitz is" (here). Although this study focused on American millennials I still found it alarming. This same headline took me back years ago, in school, where our curriculum did not include much discussion about WWII and the Holocaust was barely even mentioned. If I didn’t initiate seeking books, films, and documentaries I wouldn't know the bigger picture. It was a gruesome thought. This headline, more so. Has the school curriculum of kids today worsened? How can anyone not know about one of the most horrific atrocities committed on mankind? show more We should avoid forgetting. What with all the political tension around the world and the worrying rise of neo-fascism; the small scale genocidal horrors the media don’t bat their eyelashes on; forgetting may make history repeat itself.

"We are as insensitive as trees, as stones. And we remain as numb as trees when they are being cut down, or stones when they are being crushed."

Borowski, the author of the haunting This Way For The Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen (originally published in 1946), took his own life in 1951 by inhaling gas from a stove. This book is comprised of twelve short stories inspired by his own experiences in Auschwitz. But this collection does not stop there. It tells and also lingers in its aftermath (The January Offensive, A Visit, and The World of Stone); the struggle to pick-up fragments of a life and learning, trying to live in the after. There is an observable distance in Borowski's prose yet the ache is palpable; it surrounds then grips you. For that, it is a very difficult book to read. There are times when I had to take a break because the images and the ambiance it forms in your head are more vivid than the films about the Holocaust: pile of corpses, the Jews entering the gas chambers to their deaths, people shoveling these corpses, burning them then the smoke rising from the crematorium, et cetera, et cetera; they stay with you. To some extent, I can wrap my head around the "reasons" leading to Borowski's death.

"A dream, you see, is not necessarily visual. It may be an emotional experience in which there is depth and where one feels the weight of an object and the warmth of a body..."

But this book is more than that. It is also a piece of history as it is a memory. With the memories of before clinging in the spaces between its sentences, its hope is cautious and wary of its dangers (** "Despite the madness of war, we lived for a world that would be different. For a better world to come when all this is over. And perhaps even our being here is a step towards that world. Do you really think, that the rights of man will be restored again, we could stand the concentration camp even for one day? It is that very hope that makes people go without a murmur to the gas chambers, keeps them from risking a revolt, paralyses them into numb inactivity. It is hope that breaks down family ties, makes mothers renounce their children, or wives sell their bodies for bread, or husbands kill. It is hope that compels man to hold on to one more day of life, because that day may be the day of liberation. Ah, and not even the hope for a different, better world, but simply for life, a life of peace and rest. Never before in the history of mankind has hope been stronger than man, but never also has it done so much harm as it has in this war, in this concentration camp. We were never taught how to give up hope, and this is why today we perish in gas chambers." p122) yet giving with its tenderness through rare glimpses (** "I think about these things and smile condescendingly when people speak to me of morality, of law, of tradition, of obligation...Or when they discard all tenderness and sentiment and, shaking their fists, proclaim this the age of toughness. I smile and I think that one human being must always be discovering another — through love. And that this is the most important thing on earth, and the most lasting." p143).

These are carefully-crafted, painful stories about the reality of the concentration camps, of oppression and utmost cruelty mankind itself is capable of. Some of them brought tears to my eyes; its indubitable significance and moving remembrance hammered my heart and soul into thin strips of despair whilst my mind reels at the circumstances of the present. Highly recommended to everyone. A place to start with never forgetting. show less

This is a grim little book. It is best described as a few fictional stories and some short pieces, not quite stories sometimes, primarily about life in Auschwitz/Birkenau from the first person perspective of one of the camp's non-Jewish inmates (this is important). As a non-Jew the narrator's lot is considerably better than most, while still being abominable.

The stories are plainly told, matter of fact almost, without much commentary on the situation, etc. The author's approach is very effective at communicating the eerie everyday-ness of concentration camp life: "just another day unloading 3 or 4 trains of people for the gas chambers." Borowski lets the context, the very seeming ordinariness of these dreadful experiences, emphasize the show more appalling nature of the tasks and situations. And in the end everybody is just getting by as best they can.

A recurring theme is the docility of the people being herded to their doom. After all, people had nothing to lose by attempting to attack their executioners. Why didn't they? Borowski details people taking their last feeble possessions with them as they wait in line to be gassed. Why? What feeble hope was there? Each one seems to feel that however unlikely they are going to be saved somehow. And we are horrified because we know they will not be.

In one poignant scene, made all the more striking by being the lone example in the book, a young woman surprises her lecherous oppressor on the Auschwitz train unloading ramp by striking him and taking his gun. She shoots him and of course is shot, but none of the people surrounding her that already know they are being herded to their death, rise up with her. They ignore it, avert their gaze; not wanting to get involved.

Why do we read books like this? I don't buy the: "it's my duty to read this so it doesn't happen again." BS. There is some dirty little voyeur aspect to fiction or non-fiction like this. Death camp stories. True stories. People like this stuff. They want to read it; wish there was more of it. We tell ourselves it's okay because it really happened that way, it's history, and we need to see it, but if we were JUST making this up for fun we would be called more than sick little pornographers. We are peeking into other people's torment and death like a peep show nightmare. Which is what real horror is all about, I guess.

So, on that happy note, if you are interested in reading about what it was like in the death camps and how people manage to live their lives under the most appallingly unimaginable conditions, this should be right up your alley.... show less

Borowski was imprisoned in Auschwitz, an experience that gave rise to this collection of essays. He was a political prisoner (an 'Aryan') rather than being Jewish, and Aryan prisoners had a relatively easier time in the latter years of the camp. As the extermination of Jewish prisoners gathered pace, the Aryans were not being systematically killed, were allowed parcels from the outside, liaisons with women, and were not subject to the starvation and disease of others. They were still brutalised and murdered, but the prospect of survival was realer for them. They were also given privileged jobs, which included unloading the cattle trucks and sending incoming prisoners to the gas chambers. It is this aspect that Borowski writes about, show more with his protagonists being both victims and killers. They did what they were forced to, and did it uncomplainingly in order to stay alive, and even grew accustomed to their roles. However, feelings of responsibility and guilt were never far from the surface. This collection captures those feelings brilliantly. It is harrowing and brutal, challenging the readers’ ideas of justice, guilt and morality. It is beautifully written, and makes an interesting counterpoint to the other holocaust literature I have read which is largely from the perspective of Jewish prisoners. show less

Birkenau and Auschwitz and after...
By sally tarbox on 7 Nov. 2013
Format: Paperback
Other reviewers have said it all; but this is an immensely shocking and powerful work.
In the stories, Borowski focusses on the vast numbers of prisoners being shipped into the killing factory of Birkenau for a speedy despatch. The true horror comes from the way all these individuals are treated as a commodity, carriages unsealed, the 'transport' despoiled of their luggage by guards and other prisoners walked off to their fate.
"What's new with you?
"Not much. Just gassed up a Czech transport."

"How many have gone by so far? It's been almost two months since mid-May. Counting twenty thousand per day...around one million!"

Horrific images remain with the reader: show more the women in the experimental block "(they push out their heads between the bars, just like the rabbits my father used to keep; do you remember? grey ones with one floppy ear.)
But the dreadful world he has experienced remains with the author after Liberation; in the final story, 'The World of Stone', thoughts of the past erupt into his everyday world. Walking among a crowd, he imagines "a gust of the cosmic gale has blown the crowd into the air, all the way up to the treetops, sucked the human bodies into a huge whirlpool...mingled the children's rosy cheeks with the hairy chests of the men, entwined the clenched fists with strips of women's dresses, thrown snow-white thighs on the top, like foam, with hats and fragments of heads tangled in hair-like seaweed peeping from below."
Back in the story "The People who walked on", he tells of a female inmate trying to hide her child from the SS and how it dawned on him that "I too would like to have a child with rose-coloured cheeks and light blond hair." Perhaps the saddest fact is that after coming through such horrific experiences, Borowski took his life just three days after his daughter was born. show less

To understand these stories, I think it helps to understand the author's background. Tadeusz Borowski was born in the Soviet Ukraine to Polish parents. As a child, his father was interred in one of the harshest Soviet labor camps, above the Arctic Circle, digging the White Sea Canal. When Borowski was eight, his mother was sent to work in Siberia as well. He lived with an aunt until his family was repatriated to Warsaw in the early 1930s. In 1943, Borowski and his fiance were arrested for their participation in underground publications and sent to Auschwitz. Although both survived the camps and later married, Borowski was unable to reconcile his desire to write the truth with the demands of the communist State on authors. At the age of show more 29, he turned on the gas in his apartment and committed suicide.

This collection of twelve short stories are inspired by the author's experiences in Auschwitz and Dachau. The first two stories were written and published in Poland right after his release. "They produced a shock," writes Jan Kott in his introduction. "The public was expecting martyrologies; the Communist party called for works that were ideological, that divided the world into the righteous and the unrighteous, heroes and traitors, Communists and Fascists. Borowski was accused of amorality, decadence, and nihilism. Yet at the same time it was clear to everyone that Polish literature had gained a dazzling new talent." Borowski eschewed easy answers and wrote about the moral ambiguities that plagued him. He had survived the camps, but at what cost? Three of his stories are written from the perspective of a deputy Kapo, Vorarbeiter Tadeusz. Young, impressionable, and wanting to survive, Vorarbeiter Tadeusz has a minor position over other prisoners that gives him perks of food and clothes which allow him to survive, but at the cost of moral clarity. Small compromises become everyday, violence and lack of compassion become less uncomfortable, and he survives. But some horrors still have the power to shock, which allows Tadeusz to maintain his humanity.

The stories are horrible to read not only because of the situation, but precisely because there are no heroes, and everyone is both a perpetrator and a victim. Borowski learned this first hand in the camps and lived it afterwards in Communist Poland. The moral ambiguity of his position is, perhaps, what caused him to commit suicide. I found this collection extremely depressing, even more so than other Holocaust literature, and challenging in its unflinching look at the dark side of survival. show less

A collection of short stories set in Auschwitz and the period shortly after the war. Borowski was a Pole (non-Jewish) who was interned in Auschwitz and Dachau, and the stories are plainly fictionalised versions of real events. His style is very direct and unembellished, but he uses it to provide a broader vision and significance to what happened. It is brutal, not just in what was done to the Nazis' victims but what it made them into. The narrator laughs at an old man hurrying up, responding to an SS officer's chiding, after taking a toilet break in a ditch, because all he is hurrying for is the gas chamber; he gets into amiable conversation with a Sonderkommando who claims do have done nothing much recently, just gassed up a Czech show more transport. There are no heroes in the camp, and he gets across how many of the survivors could only survive by making sure that they were the ones with the good jobs and rations, and frequently by giving another man a shove in the direction of the gas chamber to avoid going themselves. As bleak as it sounds, but a great book. The title story, about the arrival of a transport, and a series of letters from a prisoner to his fiancee in the adjacent women's camp (as Borowski's girlfriend was), are as good as anything I've read. show less