The Holocaust refers to the era when Adolf Hitler was proclaimed supreme chancellor of Germany on January 30th, 1933. It was a stage of torture and killing of the people, specifically Jews. There were events of discrimination, harassment, and the so-called ” Final Solution” wherein several exterminations and concentration camps were established to host the extermination or mass killing by lethal gas chambers. The Nazis, exhibiting uncertainties and feelings of helplessness to the Jewish people, had exhumed approximately six million Jews (Bauer 446).
It was in late 1939 when the Germans began the isolation or segregation. Families were estranged and almost all of the people were obligated to depart their residence. Everyone was terrified and astounded by the sudden array, not perceptive of what would take place next, and what would be the Nazi’s approach. The people utilized every means to survive and eventually get out of the streets of the Ghetto. Based on the book describing Nazi’s plot, “Jews were forced to leave their homes, taking along only as much as they could carry, and move into ghettos, walled-in sections of the cities.” (Adler 56). The Germans planned to set all of the Jews inside a crowded and small area wherein they would be restricted by the guards on the ghetto area, which was considered as their home.
As the Jews lived life under the dominion of the Nazis, they never experienced from that time a normal and peaceful life. Suffering and unreasonable death came to their path in the most unexpected ways: starvation, diseases, shooting, poison gas, and overworking. Lack of food supply, space, sanitary facilities, and water were eminent. The Jews literally were helpless and the only way that kept them alive was the will to survive. Esther Klein, a survivor of the holocaust started, “… The Nazis didn’t give us anything to eat then. No water. No food. Nothing. We just walked around. No one cared who lived or who died.” (Adler 78).
The book “Ladies and Gentleman, to the gas Chamber” depicted the ultimate German’s horrible massacre of almost all of the Jewish people inside the Auschwitz camp during World War II. The morale of the people disappeared and the consequent sense of cruelty and loss of hope existed in the book. Several narrative descriptions of this cruelty can be quoted, to wit: “Here is a couple fallen on the ground, locked in a desperate embrace. He has dug his fingers convulsively into her flesh and caught her dress in his teeth. She is shrieking hysterically, swearing, blaspheming until, trampled down by a boot, she gurgles and is still. Torn apart like woods, they are driven like animal into a truck” (Borowski 2027); “Others carry a little girl who has only one leg; they hold her by the arms and the leg. Tears stream down her cheek. They throw her on the truck with the corpses. She will be cremated alive with them” (Borowski 2027).
The narrator observed his presumptions, a different sense of attitude towards the situation. As Borowski implies, “Several of us are sitting right now on a top bunk swinging our legs in a carefree manner. We take out white, extravagantly baked bread: crumbly, falling to pieces, a little provoking in taste, but, for all that, bread that had not been molding for weeks.”(Borowski 2774).
Out of the fear of eventual demise, the narrator neither has the prerogative nor the urge to save the Jews. All that he could do is to watch, and change to survive. Unless he conditioned himself of feeling dead, he will eventually die for the compassion. His colleague, Henri, represented the best example of such having been through a transition of being complicated to numbness.
Death can be considered unexpected and inevitable; have reached its pinnacle form in every means. Thus, the fear of death is eminent to all people and the uncertainties it holds: is there will be life after death; will family and friends eventually forget our existence? All in all, this fear of “all will be lost after death” becomes a challenge as well as a burden while anticipating death. Death is precisely the atrocious thing that can ever happen. Unfortunately, death has a tremendous impact on people, and on these premises, many writers have utilized death in their writings. The Ladies and Gentlemen to the Gas Chamber is an example of such. The Jewish people were faced with a situation where “death comes before them” and they were helpless in the situation. They see death right before their very eyes and they could do nothing but watch and wait for their turn. The Auzwitch camp served as the Holocaust’s abode from the Nazi’s cruelty to the Jewish people. The only way to survive was to change the way of thinking, how to see death in a different way. The author, Tadeusz Borowski, clearly described and narrated the holocaust to the concept of death and the relative reactions of several people when faced with such an inevitable situation.
Works Cited
Adler, David A. We Remember the Holocaust. New York. Henry Holt and Company, Inc.1989.
Bauer, Yehuda. Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp. Indiana Press, 1998.
Borowski, Tadeusz. “Ladies and Gentleman, to the Gas Chamber”. New York: Norton, 2002.