Customer Reviews

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

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Imre Kertesz, a concentration camp survivor and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature often asks in his work: is there life after Auschwitz? Can one live with the ineffable guilt that accompanies survival against all odds? For Borowski the answer appears to be no. On July 1, 1951, at age 29, Tadeusz Borowski opened a gas valve, put his head in an oven and took his life. There is no small amount of irony in the fact that after escaping the gas of Auschwitz and Dachau Borowski would end his life in this manner.

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 (soccer) 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 storytelling.

Equally compelling are stories that describe the 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. This book ranks with Varlam Shalamov's Kolyma Tales (the Gulag) as a monumental piece of remembrance presented in the form of short 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's testament will long remember the prose that, hopefully, will keep us from forgetting.
L. Fleisig

Tadeusz Borowski was a teenager when the Nazis invaded Poland. He was eventually arrested by the Nazis for particpating in the underground press (he had a copy of BRAVE NEW WORLD in his pocket at the time he was searched), and sent to Auschwitz. His girlfriend was also sent to Auschwitz. Borowski wrote a cycle of stories that spanned Poland under Nazi occupation, the experience of Auschwitz, and his travels after the war, to France, where he felt like a "walking ghost" amongst the exiles, and finally his return to Poland. He wrote a cycle of stories about these experiences published in two volumes in Polish, FAREWELL TO MARIA and WORLD OF STONE. His girlfriend had also survived Auschwitz and went to Sweden after the war. Borowski persuaded her to return to Poland and marry him. But life did not go well for Borowski. After he wrote his two volumes of stories, he, like many other young Poles, decided that communism might be the best thing for Poland, and subjugated his brilliant writing talent to churning out reams of "socialist realism" for the communists. But he was depressed and he was drinking heavily. When a close friend of his was tortured by the communists, he became completely disillusioned with the communists. One night in 1951, after visiting his young wife in the hospital, who was soon to give birth to their first child, he went home and killed himself. What lives on, however, are the two marvelous books of stories, among the finest ever written, detailing in a quiet, subdued way (much like the other mastepiece of man's inhumanity to man in the communist GULAG, Shalamov's KOLYMA TALES) the world he'd experienced. Unfortunately, currently only a portion of Borowski's stories are available in English translation, the ones dealing with Auschwitz, under the title, THIS WAY FOR THE GAS, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN. These are fine, fine stories. Once read, they are unforgettable. I only hope that the complete FAREWELL TO MARIA and WORLD OF STONE will be issued in English translation soon.

This book has the truth on its side, and it shows. Nothing is dramatized or sentimentalized. These tales do not even have an undercurrent of rage. With a matter-of-fact style that says more than a diatribe, these horrific - utterly horrific - accounts of life in a death camp imprint themselves on your psyche and refuse to go away. But, that is a good thing.

In the annals of holocaust literature, this is one of the more unflinching collection of death camp stories, as it depicts the stark reality of the desperate situation of those ensconced in concentration camps, where the final solution was frantically put into play. The stories are of the unimaginable and the nearly unendurable, replete with the inherent pathos of the situation of the truly desperate. It is shows the desensitization that takes place in order for one to survive the horrors of a death camp. It is an unapologetic dissertation of what camp life was truly like for those for whom surviving was the bottom line. It also shows how the Jewish people were clearly singled out for mass extermination.

The author himself survived two death camps, Auschwitz and Dachau, where he had been imprisoned from 1943 to 1945, as a young man in his early twenties. Born in the Ukraine in 1922 to Polish parents who spent time in Siberian labor camps, the author was no stranger to hardship. Yet, he was little prepared for man's inhumanity to man. His time in the death camps was to form an indelible impression on him, resulting in this collection of stories, which chronicle man's inhumanity to man. It shows how camp culture made all those within its sphere participants in its reign of terror and in the final solution. In the end, having survived the unimaginable, the author committed suicide in 1951, choosing to gas himself to death. The irony inherent in his choice of death is not lost upon the discerning reader.

Will you enjoy reading this book? The answer is no. But if you were to ask me if you should read this book then I would have to say absolutely. Borowski wrote with an honesty that I found amazing. He gave me a small window to look through and see what my grandparents might have gone through. This book while often shocking and always disturbing allows a little understanding into what life was like inside the death camps. Not for enjoyment but education.

Borowski's depiction of his days spent as an inmate in Auschwitz are totally gripping. Because the book is short stories, he is able to give different pictures and perspectives of the "Auschwitz Life" through the experiences of numerous inmates and incidents.

Incredibly, Borowski has a tremendously talented way of describing the virtually indescrible horror of the scene, without being grisly and gory. But his point is so poignantly made with the book, that it is really almost a must read for those interested in just how horribly people can treat other people.

While suicide is very rare amongst Holocaust survivors, the ones who do commit it, have a very high percentage of authors, poets and artists. These being the ones who felt the pain so deeply, that at some point, they could no longer live with what they had seen. Sadly, Borowski did take his life, and perhaps ironically, he gassed himself to death.

Once the reader has read his rendition, it is easy to understand why he cannot live with what he saw anymore, and in fact, it is hard to understand sometimes why so many other Holocaust survivors don't take their own lives.

The book is beautifully written, almost poetic at times. And it is hard to imagine anything about Auschwitz being poetic, but Borowski does manage to do it in this book. I would recommend the book to anyone who really wants to get a picture of just how low humanity can sink in extreme conditions.

This is an account of a life lived in the shadows of the crematoria. It is based on the author's experience as a non-Jew, in a German concentration camp. As a non-Jew, Borowski was entitled to certain privileges. He maintained his position in the hierarchy by following the orders of the S.S. guards: by ordering the Jews to line up on their way to the gas chambers, and by sorting through the luggage of the dead. This book is dark, dark realism, and Borowski doesn't shy away from the details (descriptions of the pit where corpses were burned are especially difficult to forget). Borowski lived at a time when, as Jan Kott writes in the introduction: "individual human destiny seems as if shaped directly by history, becoming only a chapter in it." Borowski provided us with this, his chapter. His destiny was suicide, and this direct, raw account of a terrible ordeal helps us to understand why.

Borowski's account of life in Aushcwitz is a classic. The brutality, inhumanity, and gruesome daily life in the hell-on-earth that was the Holocaust is matter-of-factly, even non-chalantly described and recounted in _This Way to the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen_. Little wonder the author put his own head in a gas oven in the years following his experiences. The images are haunting. But what I found to be most disturbing was the simple language Borowski used in retelling his experiences.

Borowski, a Pole, lived separately from the Jews who were daily incenerated. And while his life was unimaginably difficult, by some measure it was better than that of the Jews. A sense of guilt - call it survivors guilt, or regret, or perhaps at its most elemental level, deep and profound sadness - permeates the book, as it should. It is a remarkable read, profound and stunning. Highly recommended.

If there is a "best" narrative of what "non-life" in Auschwitz was like, this is it. Borowski's writing contains an ironic rage which is at all times razor sharp and unflinchingly insightful. No one emerges as a hero in Borowski, and his refusal to sentimentalize or to heroize marks this work as itself a deeply important.and courageous act of bearing witness. The book's ability to aggravate and upset readers by asking awful, crucial questions is unparalleled and the author's connection of fascism with money is brilliant.

"Auschwitz our Home" contains an exchange of letters between incarcerated lovers and in this sea of horrifying, beautiful stories, this one is both the most horrifying and the most poignant.

There is a spare simple honesty about Tadeusz Borowski's fictionalized account of his experiences in Auschwitz and Dachau - so much so that it almost seems false to use the same language while recommending it to others. There is nothing I can say that will adequately recreate the intensity Borowski achieves without resorting to hyperbolic extremes, which would actually diminish, rather than augment, his effectiveness. His stories need neither critique, sanction, nor acclaim.

What I can say about this collection is that I had an immediate visceral reaction to the events and descriptions of the first story - This Way for the Gas - and though some of that wore off as I continued, it was replaced with an increasingly uncomfortable feeling that what I think I know about myself and the world, instead of being based on a lifetime of experience, is actually a comfort zone of what I'm willing to believe. Borowski's account of 'normal' behavior in the camps - a direct result of the insane horror of the conditions - is a frightening addition to the crematoriums and the gas chambers. The idea that there was a third group, one between the perpetrators of evil and their victims, who were victims and forced to be complicit too, and who could develop a routine in the midst of the horrors they witnessed and the actions required for their survival, is elementally disturbing, and does not release any human being from its conclusions.

Once or twice, I had some small trouble following the thread of a story, but this in no way altered the impact of his overall objective. Borowski's style is plain, simple and direct - and admirable. 'This Way for the Gas' is a literature of truth, and unafraid to voice its implications, however hard they may be to see revealed. Highest recommendation.