"This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen" by Tadeusz Borowski

First published: "Proszę państwa do gazu," 1948 (English translation, 1967)

Type of work: Social realism

Principal characters:

• The narrator, a Polish inmate at Auschwitz
• Henri, a French inmate at the camp and the narrator's friend

Overview

In his story "This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen," Tadeusz Borowski describes in harsh detail, through the first-person narrator, the daily routines and horrors of the Auschwitz concentration camp. The opening scene is a surreal picture of thousands of men and women, naked, waiting through the heat and boredom until another transport arrives to carry thousands of Jews to the gas chambers. Like the narrator's friend Henri, many of the inmates are members of the Canada Kommando, the labor gangs who work at unloading the transports. Henri and the narrator are introduced as they discuss the transports while lying in their barracks, eating a simple snack of bread, onions, and tomatoes. The transports mean survival. As the guards look the other way, the laborers can "organize" food and clothing from the piles of personal possessions collected from the Jews on the way to their deaths. As Henri states, "All of us live on what they bring."

The monotony is finally broken by the approach of a transport. For the first time, the narrator joins Henri as part of the labor gang heading to the station. The station is "like any other provincial railway stop" except that the regular freight here are those sentenced to the gas chambers. While the laborers wait, Henri barters with a guard for a bottle of water, on credit, to be paid for "by the people who have not yet arrived." As the freight cars pull into the station, the desperate cries for water and air from the prisoners crammed into the cars are quickly silenced by the gunfire ordered by an officer annoyed by the disturbance.

Once the doors are opened, the prisoners surge toward the light like a "multicolored wave." The Canada Kommando members work feverishly, taking bundles from the crowd, separating those destined for the labor gangs from those headed for the chambers, loading trucks marked as Red Cross with the dazed prisoners. In sharp contrast to the mayhem on the ramps, a Schutzstaffel (SS) officer, with calm precision, marks off the new serial numbers, "thousands, of course."

A more odious task yet remains for the laborers as they are ordered to clean out the dead and dying from the cars. The narrator describes the trampled bodies of infants he carries out "like chickens." He begins to be affected by the terrors. At first intensely tired, he slips into a confused and dreamlike state as he sees the scenes repeated over and over. His own feelings of helplessness and terror turn to disgust and hatred for the Jews themselves—for, as he tells Henri, he is there, acting so brutally, only because they are.

Just as the last cars leave, the tired laborers hear a whistle, and "terribly slowly" a new transport pulls in. The cycle of atrocities begins anew. Now the Kommandos are impatient and brutally rip the bundles from the prisoners and hurl them into trucks. The scenes of horror intensify as a mother tries to abandon her children in the hope of making the labor gangs (for all mothers and their children are gassed together). A couple locked in each other's arms, "nails in flesh," are pulled apart "like cattle." In the cars are seething heaps of bloated corpses and the unconscious. The narrator can no longer overcome his mounting terror and runs blindly away from the horror. Henri finds him and tries to reassure him that one becomes seasoned to the work, as has Henri himself. There is another whistle and the "same all over again" begins, but slowed by night. There are the same motionless mountains of bodies in the cars, the same cries of despair. The narrator can no longer bear the repulsion he feels, and he vomits. However, with the vomiting, the narrator rids himself of all the horrors he has witnessed. He suddenly sees the camp as a "haven of peace" for its inmates and realizes that he and his fellow prisoners survive, that "one is somehow still alive, one has enough food." He is seasoned. As the labor gangs finish their ungodly work and prepare to return to the camp, the narrator remarks how the camp will be fed by this transport for at least a week, how this was "a good, rich transport."

Tadeusz Borowski drew on his own experiences as a prisoner at Auschwitz and Dachau for his stories on camp life. This, the first, published shortly after his release, graphically gives testimony that people are capable of doing anything to other people. More troubling is the realization that ordinary people, good people, will do anything to survive. The inmates of the camp learn to survive by assisting in the atrocities. For the Canada Kommando, the piles of plunder—jewelry, money, gold—taken from the nameless thousands are not as precious as the pair of shoes or can of cocoa that they can "organize."

By using a first-person narrator (one never given a name), the author clearly identifies himself with the responsibility and guilt to be shared by all. The narrator senses his responsibility when he lets his disgust turn to anger at the thousands who go passively to their deaths. He is forced to act inhumanly to survive as a human. As often noted, the narrator is both executioner and victim. He suffers the knowledge of his collaboration. Borowski called his stories on the concentration camps "a voyage to the limit of a particular experience." That experience is the realization of what a person can and will do to survive.

The true horror of Borowski's experience is the routine of the collaboration in the atrocities. He has his narrator speak with the detached, objective voice of a reporter in most of the story. The phrases are simple and direct; the incredible brutality of the events needs no commentary. "I go back inside the train; I carry out dead infants; I unload luggage; I touch corpses." The normalcy of events is heightened by the descriptions and actions of the SS officers and guards. Against the backdrop of feverish action left to the camp inmates, the SS officers "move about, dignified, businesslike." They discuss the routines of their lives—children, family—as thousands are routinely executed. There is nothing out of the ordinary taking place there at Auschwitz.

Several key images appear in the story. Food—the bare essence of survival—is a recurring motif. The narrator is first seen eating "crisp, crunchy bread," bacon, onions, and tomatoes. The Greek prisoners find rotting sardines and mildewed bread; as Borowski simply states, "They eat." The gangs rest with vodka, cocoa, and sugar "organized" from the transport. Even the bodies of the dead, trampled infants, are described as chickens. As the gangs return to camp, they are weighed down by the "load of bread, marmalade, and sugar" that they collected. Food as the image for survival occurs throughout Borowski's Auschwitz stories.

Another recurring image in these stories is that of insects. The mindless drive to eat and live surfaces in humanity as well as in insects. The Greek prisoners sit, "their jaws working greedily, like huge human insects." What Borowski calls the "animal hunger" of the camps drives them to eat whatever is available.

The relentless machinery of the transports and the corresponding helplessness of the prisoners are seen in the author's use of the wave simile. Borowski describes the prisoners of the first transport as a wave of "a blind, mad river." Nothing can stand in its way. However, it is not an isolated phenomenon. The last transport also discharges its freight, which is like a wave that "flows on and on, endlessly."

Sources for Further Study

Bigsby, Christopher. Remembering and Imagining the Holocaust: The Chain of Memory. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

Crnković, Gordana P. Eastern European Literature in Conversation with American and English Literature. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2000.

Hartley, James. Suffering Witness: The Quandary of Responsibility After the Irreparable. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000.

Parmet, Harriet L. "Images of the Jew Focused on in the Translated Polish Works of Tadeusz Borowski, Jerzy Andrzejewski, and Czeslaw Milosz." Shofar 19, no. 3 (April 30, 2000): 13-26.

Schwarz, Daniel R. Imagining the Holocaust. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999.