I finished reading This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, by Tadeusz Borowski and found it quite disturbing. It is not a book one can call enjoyable, because enjoyable it is not. Borowski narrates with intense and graphic details concentration camp living (if you can call it that), events and situations that occurred during the Holocaust.
This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, is a book that holds a dramatic collection of short stories, concentration camp stories to be specific. With extreme detail Borowski demonstrates how daily life in the concentration camp almost becomes mundane in the scheme of things. The routines become rote and boring, yet he imparts the fact that within the boredom, they are given an opportunity for survival if they can endure the routine.
The prisoners find ways around the scenes set before them, and block out much of the atrocities that they find before their very eyes. They are almost like zombies, individuals with no outward feelings, no outward signs of life, as they parade through each day incognito. They mock each other and seem to find enjoyment in it. Albeit, a warped enjoyment. That is life in the prison camp. The cruelty is overt.
Some of the prisoners exercise their own forms of atrocity on other prisoners, almost acting as if they are uncaring within their interactions. And, to a degree, to act otherwise could cause them, to be sent to the gas chamber. From the snickering and the sarcasm, to the overtly brutal and physical contact, the external appearance of the prisoners towards each other is one that lacks emotion and compassion. Borowski is quite frank and to the point in his description of the dynamics and lack of human sympathy and humaneness. It is a dog eat dog world, where living becomes the primary force, and where working will get you food. There is no time or place for emotion or sympathy.
Not only do the Nazis brutalize, offend and demean the Jews, but the prisoners themselves, do it to each other. They even do it to dying individuals. It is a coping mechanism of sorts, a mode of survival that Borowski demonstrates with gruesome detail. He does not impart judgment within his writing, but rather writes concisely, sharply, frankly and to the point on the issues within the stories. His stories are a journey into the cruelty of man, and a journey into the mind of what is normal and abnormal behavior. Where does normal behavior end and abnormal behavior begin? Where is that fine line?
Borowski, himself, was a Holocaust Survivor, so he knows from where he writes. It is not coincidental that the the main character throughout all of the stories is named Tadek. Some of what is written did occur within Borowski’s experiences, but some of the situations did not occur, and were written to reflect what man will do to survive the horrors of war, and what man did in fact do in order to survive the Holocaust. Tadeusz Borowski understood what man was capable of, and what man would do (or not do), and he penned it so compellingly in This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen.
I had to put the book down, and take breathers before returning to read it. The stories were atrocious and depressing, yet it was a book I wanted to finish.
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I personally own and have read this book.
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Tuesday February 2, 2010 – 18th of Sh’vat, 5770
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