Tadeusz Borowski was a Polish writer famous for his wartime works based on his personal experience when he was a prisoner in the Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz. His works had a great influence on the European literature and society. One of his most famous works is a collection of short stories This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen. These stories describe the true pictures of horror that Jewish people survived during the World War II. The author deals with the kinds of defense mechanisms that deadened human responses to horror and his stories help understand how the Nazis managed to dominate so much of the world for so long. The story is written in the first person and the other describes the events as the witness and participant of that horror.
There are many literature works devoted to the live in concentration camps and extermination of European Jews. These events are the “shameless page” of the human history, but we cannot escape it. Different authors provided various points of view on what could make people support the process of genocide and concentration camps. Some authors suggested that it was a consequence of a German barbarism, others described holocaust as a result of “social pathology” that was caused by political and social events. However, no matter what pushed people to behave in that way, the results were horrible: thousands of innocent people died only because they were Jews. The cruelty of that time cannot be compared to nothing.
Many authors, who write about these events, described them from the psychological point of view, in the majority of cases. They strived to depict the amorality and cruelty of holocaust through the “prism” of inner world of people who became victims of holocaust or were the witnesses of the events. Tadeusz Borowski used different approach. He did not describe the feeling and thoughts of prisoners or soldiers. He depicted a true picture without making use of any stylistic means or bright descriptions of what he wrote about.
In the story This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, Borowski describes the brutal world where the power of will to live overcomes fear, compassion and shame. The prisoners live, work and eat next to the place where others were killed. There are no difference between human being and animals, the overall picture reminds the bloody slaughter, and it does not mean whether it is an old man, young woman or a child. The border between the normal and abnormal is completely vanished. The author does not explore the people’s psychology and does not analyzes their behavior, he only shows the terrible, but typical day at the camp Auschwitz. The narrator is involved into the uploading the poisoned Jews from the cattle cads and sending them at the gas chambers:
“The bolts crack, the doors fall open. A wave of fresh air rushes inside the train. People inhumanly crammed, buried under incredible heaps of luggage, suitcases, trunks, packages, crates, bundles of every description (everything that had been their past and was to start their future). Monstrously squeezed together, they have fainted from heat, suffocated, crushed one another” (Borowski 37).
People do not know why they are here and what is going to happen. As we proceed reading, we come to understanding that the narrator there for only one reason: he is forced to do that in order to survive, but he becomes the part of the camp community and he can do nothing with this: We all know what this means, and we look at each other with hate and horror” (Borowski 37). He does not know whether he is “a good person” because he did not want to be a part of that cam but now he says:
“I don’t know why, but I am furious, simply furious with these people – furious because I must be here because of them. I feel no pity. I am not sorry they’re going to the gas chamber. Damn them all! I could throw myself at them, beat them with my fists. It must be pathological, I just can’t understand”. (Borowski 40).
The narrator asks, whether they all are good people. In fact, the one who can do the things like that cannot be considered a good person. But, can we justify their actions taking into consideration the circumstances and situation of war in which they had to live. The author leaves this task for the reader. In fact, the question “are we good people” is directed to the audience, as well as to himself. He tries to find something human inside his soul, but feels that all good things have disappear and it serves as protection from reality. In fact, the war topsy-turned the peoples’ perception of the world, and it is hard to say who was right and who was wrong. But the way people behaved was a mechanism of protection from the horror. May be this “mechanism” that allowed Nazis managed to dominate so much of the world for so long.
Thus, This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentleman is a true story about horror of the concentration camps. The tragedy of the story lies in the fact that the author describes the murders and violence as a “daily routine” for the people who worked at that camp. The story provides the readers with the understanding of how Nazis managed to dominate so much of the world for so long and shows the cruel reality that people faced.
Works Cited
Borowski, Tadeusz. This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen. New York: Penguin Classics, 1992.