This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen
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24 April 2022
I picked up Tadeusz Borowski's This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen at Birkenau last week because he was a Polish rather than Jewish author and I wanted to read a firsthand account of the terrible place from someone who kept their sense of humor through it. I was not disappointed by this semi-autobiographical collection of short stories compiled posthumously from Borowski's works. Borowski was felt survivor guilt acutely and it comes through both in this book and his suicide before his 30th birthday. In the book we learn what it was like to be an "Aryan" in the concentration camp where the Nazis murdered over a million Jews. He showcases the façade they put up with concerts and work projects that let the Nazis pretend for their own people and the rest of the world that this was just a camp and not an extermination facility. He details how he and other prisoners assisted in the execution process and profited from the belongings of the executed. He evidences the anguish of this complicity turning into anger against the victims of the Holocaust. And he forces us all to ask ourselves the question, if put in that terrible situtation could we have done better? If forced to harm my fellow man, where would I have drawn the line? Helping the condemned out of the train? Forcing them to undress and taking their belongings? Lying to them? What would I have done to stay alive to tell the tale of what truly happened and complete the sacred task of living my life? Borowski's simple language and brutal stories show us what we are all capable of.
