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

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.

Tadeusz Borowski (b. 1922, d. 1951) spent over two years in Nazi concentration camps, principally Auschwitz and then Dachau. After the War, he wrote a number of stories about the concentration camps, which no doubt are based largely on personal experiences. They have been collected under the jaunty, sardonic title THIS WAY FOR THE GAS, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN. The book is a unique contribution to concentration camp literature.

Borowski was not Jewish. He was imprisoned by the Nazis for his involvement in underground educational and publishing enterprises in Occupied Warsaw. He was sent to Auschwitz as a worker, essentially a slave. He and his non-Jewish comrades were put to work building and maintaining camp infrastructure and processing the hundreds of thousands of Jews from the railway ramp, where the transport trains arrived, to the gas-chambers and crematoria, to the marshes and fields where ashes and bones were dumped.

In one of the pieces in the book, the first-person narrator writes to his fiancée, who is imprisoned at Birkenau (as was Borowski's own fiancée): "I do not know whether we shall survive, but I like to think that one day we shall have the courage to tell the world the whole truth and call it by its proper name." That, of course, is what Borowski did in THIS WAY FOR THE GAS. And for him, part of the "whole truth" was the complicity and the guilt of those who, like him, survived. (The real-life coda to the book is that Borowski, just as he was gaining acclaim as one of the literary lions of post-War communist Poland, committed suicide by inhaling the gas from a gas stove.)

It is a powerful book. If one of my sons asked me to name one book to read about the concentration camps, I would tell him "If This Is a Man", by Primo Levi. If he then asked for a second book, THIS WAY FOR THE GAS would be it.

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.

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.

I have been passionate about reading everything about the Holocaust. I wasn't allowed to as a child and by accident read House of Dolls in a friends house in the 60's. I was horrified and more so when I learned I had lost two great aunts from Poland. This book is difficult to read. It's not only the horror of it all, but the beautiful souls that never had the chance to live. That part jumps out at you. The loss of so many people as a normal part of the day is pure hell. The author did not want you to like the narrator but you can't help but see that through the tough exterior he had built to protect himself, he did suffer. He hated himself for feeling and hated himself for living. Probably that's why he/narrator killed himself. It wasn't so much survivor's guilt (though he probably had that too) as not being able to cope in the world after the war. He didn't belong anywhere except in a camp. He called Paris a place where corpses live. He didn't know who to hate more, who to blame. The Germans in his quasi memoir are inhuman and cruel to a point where they seem almost a caricature, yet you know it is absolutely true. I can't say I liked this book. It is not a book to like. It is a book to keep, to remember, to mourn. I keep in my mind the picture of a young girl with blonde curls who confronts the narrator with "where are they taking us". He is not allowed to say. She answers, "never mind I know" and she goes to the death truck even though the Germans want to keep her in the camp. He is blinded by her youth and maturity and loss. And so are we.

For a while I tried to read this book with a highlighting pen. But I was using the pen to defend myself. By marking it I hoped to turn it into an object of contemplation; I was keeping it at a distance. Eventually highlighting it became intolerable--obscene.

So I tried to simply read it. The stories were slow going. I would read a few lines and put the book down and stare at the ceiling. I'd think about my breathing. I became convinced that the book wanted to destroy me.

In the end, in a technical sense, I read the book; but I don't call what I did reading. It felt--feels still--more like surviving. I finished the book and thought: I survived.

Or perhaps I didn't--shouldn't. I don't know if it's possible to make your way though this book without some part of you--perhaps your hope or innocence (which might be nice words for your delusions)--dying.

In T[[ASIN:0679728562 The Captive Mind]], Czeslaw Milosz calls Borowski "the disappointed lover." He says: "[Borowski's] nihilism results from an ethical passion, from disappointed love of the world and of humanity."

But I don't think Borowski is disappointed by the world. Near the end of the book Borowski writes:

"I sit in someone else's room, among books that are not mine, and, as I write about the sky, and the men and women I have seen, I am troubled by one persistent thought--that I have never been able to look also at myself."

That's Borowski's disappointment: He survived the camps. Unable to accept that he'd survived, unable to look at himself because he survived, he put himself into an oven and did not survive.

But first he wrote this book. He used his writing to tell us why he had to die. So we shouldn't be surprised that This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen is unbearable, unreadable. The fact that it's unbearable makes clear that his suicide was justified, necessary.

Most of us are killed by the lies we tell ourselves. He, at least, was killed by the truth--a truth that he resolved to see before it finally killed him.

First of all, the narrator is not Jewish; he is a Pole that lived apart from the Jews in the camp and therefore got better treatment. Apart from that, what really makes this an interesting read is the way that the narrator sort of looks at life in a concentration camp rather non chalantly. There's a great variety of different emotions being presented here. He gets bored, tired, lonely, and angry, all while telling of the horrors of the camp as a sort of backing. The perspective really makes it interesting, and its small, and written in an easy to read manner. You could read this in about two hours if you really tried. Read the story about the Russian soliders being executed. Its almost as horrifying as a Lovecraft story! For anyone interested in the Holocaust, this is a definate must read.

If you want another aspect of the Shoah, this is the book to read. Somehow, Borowski manages to write about the unthinkable in a totally everyday way. What is it to have your concious being, your limits defined in a concentration camp? How is it to live day to day without hope amongst the unthinkable? Along with David Watt's "Stoker",and Martin Gilbert's amazing academic work this is a must read for student's of the Halocaust. But be warned, no wonder Borowki committed suicide. A brilliant piece of writing,