This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen (Penguin Twentieth Century Classics) [Paperback]

This slight yet multi-layered shift in perspective with respect to other Holocaust literature lends an unpleasant feeling to some of the early stories. We, as readers, are conditioned in our responses, and are unsettled by the detailed and ongoing narrative of camp life, in which the inmates themselves, including the narrator, cheat and commit acts of violence as a matter of routine. For the narrator and many of his companions, the immediate threat of death is kept at bay by a mixture of luck, resourcefulness and complicity. The guilt that arose out of this complicity (sometimes referred to as "survivor guilt", but in this case much more complicated and deep-rooted than that) is discusssed somewhat obliquely in Jan Kott's introduction to the Penguin edition (re-read the introduction after finishing the first few stories - it will make much more sense).

Perhaps the ultimate achievement of the Nazis' program of debasement and dehumanization was to ensure that the victims themselves participated in the atrocities. An acture awareness of this will have remained with Borowski until his untimely death by his own hand in post-war, communist-era Poland. We can only guess at the role his own feelings of guilt may have played in his suicide.

These stories are his legacy: his detachment and cool description, and seemingly effortless control of the form in the very shortest of the stories, overcome the limitations of an occasionally clunking translation to leave a priceless testimony that should be read by anybody with an interest in the Holocaust, and all those with a concern for how differences in historical and literary perspective can produce valuable insights and worthwhile literature.

Borowski was born in Soviet occupied Ukraine to Polish parents. His father was sent to a Soviet work camp, building the White Sea Canal, but was released in an exchange of prisoners with Poland. Upon his father's release, the family settled in Warsaw. Although not Jewish, Borowski was arrested by the Gestapo in 1943 for subversive activities when he was caught surreptitiously printing his own poetry. He spent the rest of the war in Auschwitz and Dachau. The first piece of luck or fate that saved his life was the decision by the Nazis to stop exterminating non-Jewish prisoners two weeks before Borowski's arrival.

The series of stories contained in This Way for the Gas are all written in the voice of one prisoner, Tadeusz. Not unexpectedly the stories appear to be loosely autobiographical. Borowski's writing is not overloaded with emotion. It is descriptive and matter of fact. The day-to-day tone of the writing, writing that describes death and deprivation as normal events adds an emotional impact to the stories.

For example, in one scene the prisoner Tadeusz describes a football match played by the prisoners. He served as goalkeeper and described his walk to retrieve a ball that was kicked way over the net. As he walks to the ball he sees through the barbed wire fence truckloads of prisoners being herded through the gas chambers. Later in the match he has to retrieve another ball. As he returns to the goal he matter-of-factly estimates that 5,000 prisoners have been gassed between his retrieving the two balls. It is powerful story.

Equally compelling are stories that describe that numerous decisions Tadeusz and his fellow prisoners made every day in order to survive. Taking clothes from the luggage of prisoners destined for the gas in order to trade the clothes for bread. People fight for survival and despite a certain ethical code amongst prisoners (there are some things even the dying won't do) they all know that the steps they take to survive often means that someone else will perish. Borowski does not flinch from subjecting his alter ego and his fellow prisoners to a critical self-examination of these choices. Both Borowski and his narrator survived Auschwitz. But as you can see from these flawlessly executed stories the question of how much of one's humanity remains is a difficult question. The emaciated bodies of the survivors could often be repaired. But the sense of a moral inner flame extinguished by the acts required for survival is not so easily relit. The reader cannot help but wonder whether the lingering impact of those choices in Auschwitz somehow invariably led to the choice he made in July 1951.

Tadeusz Borowski's "This Way for the Gas Ladies and Gentlemen" is a wonderful example of how fiction can portray the horrors of genocide with an emotional clarity that non-fiction sometimes lacks. It ranks with Varlam Shalamov's Kolyma Tales (the Gulag) as a monumental piece of remembrance presented in the form of sort stories, vignettes of life in a place with little mercy and less humanity. They each stand as stark testimony, even though they are works of literature and not history, to the "evil that men do."

Upon finishing "This Way for the Gas Ladies and Gentleman" I found myself wanting to repeat the words "never again" as a refrain. Yet upon reflection one looks at subsequent world events: Bosnia, Cambodia, Chechnya, Sudan, and Rwanda (among others) and asks whether humanity makes the phrase "never again" a futile gesture. It has been said that those who do not remember the past are doomed to repeat it. Anyone who reads Borowski testament will long remember the prose that keeps us from forgetting.

You will not regret picking this book up and reading it.