"Despite the madness of war, we lived for a world that would be different..."
On Borowski's 'This way for the gas, ladies and gentlemen'
The one thing I love about history and historical fiction is its uncanny way of reminding us that nothing is truly past. We live within unending cycles of human obliquity, and historical events are just episodic manifestations of our hubris.
It is with stories like Borowski’s that I realize the imprudence of viewing historical events from the narrow lens of objectivity.
Despite wars, plunder, pillage, and destruction in centuries past, despite calls of ‘never again’ at the end of each cycle, we find ourselves spinning uncontrollably once again. Much like the calls to end gun violence after each massacre are made awaiting the next.
Even after months, much as the rest of the world is incredulous at how the war in Ukraine (or for that matter, the past war in Iraq) was allowed to happen, much as we know and read each objective analysis of why it happened, nothing must inure us to its ‘madness’.
This story is not just a war story.
A diorama of the Krema II gas chamber at Auschwitz.
“There are years and places … in which history reveals its menace and destructive force with particular clarity … It is then that individual human destiny seems as if shaped directly by history, becoming only a chapter in it.” (Borowski & Kott, 1976, p. 12)
…writes Jan Kott in his introduction to Tadeusz Borowski’s collection of Auschwitz stories.
He refers to epochal, ‘chosen’ times and places in the history of the world where the ‘historical destiny of man’ binds individual fate. Europe, mid-twentieth century, was one such place. Tadeusz Borowski's was one such fate.
His was indeed a cruel destiny. A life that came of age in the most infamous human killing machinery, Auschwitz. A young Polish boy of 20 was arrested in Warsaw in February 1943 and transported a couple of months later to Auschwitz. A few months later, he writes to his parents in one of his many letters (dtd. Nov. 21, 1943) from the camp, “Your son who is now of age sends you all his love. He’s learning to know life to be able to face the future.” (Drewnowski, 2007, p. 20)
Through a convoluted maze of historical and secret pacts between Germany and the Soviet Union, Hitler had annexed western Poland by September 1939. The Soviet Union, in turn, invaded and took control of eastern Polish territories. The offensive was Hitler’s stepped-up attempt, after Austria and the Czechoslovak Republic, and Lithuania, at creating Lebensraum (living space) for the Germans. The Poles arguably lived through the most prolonged and most complicated phase of the ensuing hardship that enveloped the whole of Europe.
Borowski was just 17 when the Germans came. He completed high school in an underground lyceum and attended classes at Warsaw University, conducted in secret at private homes. He lived with Maria Rundo, his fiancée, who was also a part of the Polish underground resistance. All around them, the Jews of Warsaw were being rounded up and sent to the ghetto.
In February 1943, the Gestapo arrested Rundo for her role in the resistance. A day later, Borowski, who was searching for Maria, was caught in the same trap, taken to a Polish prison, and later deported to Auschwitz. He was 119 198 at Auschwitz. Maria was brought there and placed in the FKL, Frauenkonzentrationslager (Women’s camp).
He was amongst the ‘lucky' ones. The gassing of Aryans and Polish political prisoners had been halted just weeks earlier at the concentration camp but not out of a change of heart of the invaders. They needed all the capacity to exterminate the Jews from then on - the stepping up of Hiter's Final Solution.
Borowski started out as a poet. Auschwitz changed him. He discovered an aggressive style of prose eloquently evident in his camp stories. The Auschwitz stories that, once you read them, are unforgettable. “The book is one of the cruelest testimonies to what men did to men.” writes Jan Kott.
This way for the gas, ladies and gentlemen
Borowski’s haunting story begins with a factual description of the ‘scene’ at camp by the narrator, Tadek.
“All of us walk around naked. The delousing is finally over, and our striped suits are back from the tanks of Zyklon B solution, an efficient killer of lice in clothing and of men in gas chambers.”
Somewhere in this description stands a casual mention that no new transports (the deportation of millions of Jews from all over Europe to the concentration camps) have come in for several days. “We are without even our usual diversion: the wide roads leading to the crematoria are empty.”
On this hot, sultry, ordinary, almost dull day, thousands of men and women hang around naked in open-air yards awaiting the disinfection to be completed.
In the same matter-of-fact manner, the author details a conversation between Tadek and Henri. Henri is French and a part of ‘Kanada,’ a fleet of prisoners (Kommando) assigned to unload and direct the cattle-car transports of Jews.
The two are eating slices of crisp, fresh bread sent by Tadek’s mother from Warsaw. They are also eating bacon and onion. Henri “dreams aloud” of French wine that comes with the Jewish transports from Paris and Marseilles. The Jews rounded up in different countries were put on these cattle cars along with their belongings. No one was told they were going to die as soon as they stepped off those trains. The only charity afforded them.
The Kanada Kommandos kept the loot of food that came with the transports; all valuables - gold, money, gold teeth, gems - were taken by the SS and sent to the Reich. When Henri promises him good champagne next time, Tadek admonishes him and tells him that he would never be able to smuggle good wine from the ramp of the little train station where the transports arrived.
Tadek again remonstrates him, saying there might be no more people left to kill. Henri gets upset by this, saying they can’t run out of people to kill “… or we will starve to death in this blasted camp. All of us live on what they bring.”
The quantity and quality of food served at the camp could never sustain the prisoners, considering the hard labor the prisoners were subjected to. Most who survived were skeletal. The others were dead.
The camp hierarchy allowed for such smuggling from the transports by the few privileged Kapos and camp functionaries. Keeping these positions and being in the good books of the SS kept them alive, and yet the SS didn’t allow those operating the gas chambers and crematoria to live for very long. They were, after all, live witnesses to the genocide.
There was a hierarchy of power that the SS encouraged to keep the prisoners from banding together. Jews were assigned as kapos to gas and burn their own. Criminal prisoners were preferred by the SS as they were ‘willingly’ brutal to other inmates. There was mistrust amongst prisoners of different nationalities and repulsion towards the kapos who were spat upon. The kapos did the work assigned for some privileges in the form of extra food, cigarettes, alcohol, or of course, for fear of their lives.
In this dystopian, other-worldly setting, as Henri dreams of a transport that will get more life-saving food, Tadek murmurs that they get their packages from home (some Polish political prisoners like the narrator Tadek, and like Borowski, were allowed the luxury of letters and food packages from home).
Henri replies,
“Some of you Poles get packages. But what about us, and the Jews and the Russkis? And what if we had no food, no organization from the transports, do you think you’d be eating those packages of yours in peace? We wouldn’t let you!”
Suddenly, during this conversation in the barracks, there is commotion. Almost like a dream come true, a transport is announced. The Kanada group assembles to go to the station ramp. Henri asks Tadek to join them since they need more men. They march off to the station where the Silesian chestnut trees provide shade from the unbearably hot day.
After a long wait and almost like a much-awaited, festive procession, the first transport finally arrives. When it grinds to a halt, there is a sudden noisy outburst with cries for water and air. Scared faces appear at the tiny slots. An exasperated SS officer gestures to one of the guards to shoot into the train because it is too noisy. The guard does so. Everything goes silent.
The guards start unloading the cattle cars where they are ‘inhumanly crammed.’ “Monstrously squeezed together, they have fainted from heat suffocated, crushed one another.”
This particular transport is from Poland, of Polish Jews. One of them asks a guard what is going to happen to them. He lies that he does not know. “It is the camp law: people going to their death must be deceived to the very end.”
The SS officer announces to the Kommandos that anyone taking anything apart from food will be shot on the spot.
Unbeknownst to the new arrivals, as the selection occurs, an SS officer, politely, almost civilly, directs them in the direction they need to go, leaving all their belongings on the ramp. To the left are the waiting trucks where the women and children are loaded to be taken directly to the gas chambers. Some of the men who are ordered to step to the right “… will go to the camp. In the end, they too will not escape death, but first, they must work.”
A conveyor-belt-like operation is set in motion. Trucks go to and fro along with a red cross van carrying the Zyklon B for the gassing. Once the cattle cars have been emptied, the Kanada men are supposed to clean them up. Inside is human excrement, filth, and little abandoned babies who have squashed, trampled, and suffocated to death. They are brought out by Tadek “like chickens, holding several in each hand.”
As a woman takes the dead babies from Tadek’s hand, he asks Henri if they are ‘good people.’ He wonders because he feels no pity, no sadness for those headed for the gassing. In fact, he is mad at them because he has to be there doing this work because of them.
Tadek relates the brutality occurring on the ramp: a little girl is held down by the boot and shot by an SS officer. A woman who denies her child so that she may be sent to the camp to work is thrown onto the truck bound for the gas by a Russian kapo along with the child. A small girl with only one leg is thrown on top of a truck loaded with corpses - she will be burnt alive with the dead. A bloated corpse of a woman who has died on the train is loaded by the workers.
The work carries on late into the night. One freight car rolls in after another. Tadek, exhausted from the work and the sultriness of the day, throws up on the side of the rails. He yearns to go back to the camp, to his bunk to sleep.
“Suddenly, I see the camp as a haven of peace. It is true, others may be dying, but one is somehow still alive, one has enough food …”
Around fifteen thousand Jews have been processed by the killing machine that day. “For several days, the entire camp will live off this transport … was a good, rich transport.”
The Kanada workers are marched back to camp as columns of smoke rise from the crematoria. “…the transport is already burning.”
Borowski's atavistic world
The story provides a view of life at camp from a perspective not often witnessed in post-war literature. A no-heroism world, an atavistic, animalistic world, a dog-eat-dog world where the survival of the labor camp depends on the extermination of the incoming transports.
The atavism and return to a primal existence are underlined by Borowski’s repeated references to people as animals. There’s no civilization here. Just an animal existence. People are like lice - the earth is to be disinfected of them. “The camp has been sealed off tight…not one solitary louse can sneak through the gate.” (Borowski & Kott, 1976, p. 29)
The hungry Greeks rummaging for rotting food are like ‘pigs.’ They munch like ‘huge human insects.’ Cattle cars transport people. The Jews getting off them are like ‘fish cast out on the sand.’ Dead infants are like chickens. The Kommandant of the women’s camp has a ‘rat-like’ smile. Stray children on the ramp are like stray dogs. Food signifies power. Whoever has the ‘grub’ has the strength to survive. That is what remains in this savage place.
The shock of reading of this place for the first time is not yours alone. That’s how almost everyone reacted initially. It was published in Poland soon after the war and initially received a fair amount of shock and indignation at the moral silence and seeming ambiguity. There is no grand gesturing, no moral positing, no heroism, no generosity, hell, there’s no good or bad competing against each other. It’s just the way it is. A world of animal realism. Of survivalism. In a destroyed, dystopian, apocalyptic world.
The stories ultimately found their rightful place at the forefront of Holocaust literature and Borowski was widely acclaimed for them in Poland and elsewhere.
What tears down the reader is the knowledge of the factual nature of his writing. Albeit not autobiographical, he does tell it as it was. The narrator is written in the first person.
Borowski himself said,
“It is impossible to write about Auschwitz impersonally. The first duty of Auschwitzers is to make clear just what a camp is ... the reader will unfailingly ask: But how did it happen that you survived? ... Tell then, how you bought places in the hospital, easy posts, how you shoved the ‘Moslems’ (prisoners who had lost the will to live) into the oven ... what you did in the barracks, unloading the transports ... tell about the hierarchy of fear, about the loneliness of every man. But write that you, you were the ones who did this. That a portion of the sad fame of Auschwitz belongs to you as well." (Borowski & Kott, 1976, p. 22)
Jan Kott writes about this acceptance of guilt that is so apparent in the story.
“The identification of the author with the narrator was the moral decision of a prisoner who had lived through Auschwitz - an acceptance of mutual responsibility, mutual participation and mutual guilt for the concentration camp.”
The resemblance of the narrator to the author stops at a couple of places, though. The narrator has the author’s name (Tadek is short for Tadeusz) and nationality. However, from all witness accounts, Tadeusz was not ambivalent and morally withdrawn from life at camp like his narrator.
He deliberately sketches a morally ambivalent world from his experiences. One of the ways of doing this was that there was no obvious perpetrator. No one SS officer was the demon that the prisoners needed to be saved from. The anonymity of the evil is what made it intriguing. So too was the anonymity of the victim. People were insects, animals getting crushed in a criminal system with no choice but to comply.
The narrator, Tadek, refers to the mass of people unloading from the transports as a river trying to find a new bed. People were stripped of their individual identities because there was no place for personal choice in this world. There’s barely a name other than Henri in the story. It is either an ‘SS officer,’ or a Russki, or the Greeks, a little girl, or a corpse, the thousands of naked women, the Kanada men or the Moslems, the transports, or the dead, or a pair of human beings.
The ‘crime’ that many Auschwitz survivors and camp functionaries committed was the choiceless choice of staying alive. The kapos went through stages of prosecution and persecution in the public eye. Many were indicted, sentenced to death, or life imprisonment depending on the brutality meted out by each.
Many people saw them as victims of the system, forced to collaborate with the Nazis. A system that debased human existence left blurred all concepts of morality and justice. The tragedy was in the situation, and the entire structure was rotten. There was no community and no looking out for each other in this world. There was, as Tadek says in the story, only a ‘communal death’ that awaited everyone.
Another of Borowski’s camp stories, ‘Auschwitz, our home’, is written in the form of nine letters directed to the narrator’s fiancée. Once again, there is an almost autobiographical resemblance between him and the narrator in this story. In the fourth letter, the narrator writes,
“Try to grasp the essence of daily events discarding your sense of horror and loathing and contempt and try to find for it all a philosophic formula…If I had said to you … take a million people, or two million, or three, kill them in such a way that no one knows about it, not even they themselves, enslave several hundred thousand more, destroy their mutual loyalty, pit man against man, and surely … you would have thought me mad…Why is it that nobody cries out, nobody spits in their faces, nobody jumps at their throats? We doff our caps to the SS men…if our name is called, we obediently go with them to die, and - we do nothing.” (Borowski & Kott, 1976, p. 112)
This is Borowski’s world, the reality of which is hard to summon and imagine. His narrator says, “I think we should speak about all the things happening around us. We are not evoking evil irresponsibly or in vain, for we have now become a part of it …” (Borowski & Kott, 1976, p. 113)
Once again, the agonizing guilt that tormented Borowski and shaped his worldview is laid bare by one of his narrators.
Again, the narrator implores his fiancée,
“Look carefully at everything around you and conserve your strength. For a day may come when it will be up to us to give an account … to the living - to speak up for the dead.” (Borowski & Kott, 1976, pp. 115–116)
Here, we may have just found the rationale, the reason for Borowski’s bare prose. His almost narrative, documenting voice in his stories. So much so that they are sometimes mistaken for memoirs. There’s no dearth of documentation and survivor accounts from Auschwitz. However, Borowski’s voice is unique because it presents not the survivor but the ‘accomplice’s view.
Czeslaw Milosz, the Nobel-winning Polish poet, wrote of Borowski’s work,
“In the abundant literature of atrocity of the 20th century, one rarely finds an account written from the point of view of an accessory to the crime.”
In the Polish review, Andrzej Wirth and Adam Czerniawski write,
“…the very idea of a criminal and his victim become relative because the system turns victims into criminals.” (WIRTH & CZERNIAWSKI, 1967, p. 47)
In a simulated choiceless world of destroyed values, how are the perpetrators of the crimes committed under duress held to any notion of justice? Auschwitz gave the world that simulated, unbelievable reality. It created a prototype.
Borowski, who was clearly no moral absolutist, found an image of a man that could take one to the edge of an experience in this world.
“Borowski’s tales present the horrors of the camp as reflections of basic human nature and impulse, stripped of the artificial boundaries of culture and custom,” writes the blurb of the Yale University Press. (Here in Our Auschwitz and Other Stories | Yale University Press, n.d.)
He unflinchingly laid these ‘reflections of basic human nature’ as bare as the naked bodies in his stories. He forces his readers to think of what is possible when a man is pushed to the extreme. Is our moral framework just conditioning? Does man return to an animalistic, atavistic design meant for all species when the conditions ask for survival? Was Auschwitz just a coincidence - a coming together of huge improbabilities and idiosyncrasies of history?
Borowski himself raises these questions through his stories, and he has an answer.
“You see, the inexplicable actually happens … I listen avidly to tales about prisons … about the monstrously perfected techniques for torturing man, and I find it impossible to believe that all this just sprang suddenly out of somebody’s head … I find it impossible to comprehend this sudden frenzy of murder, this mounting tide of atavism…” (Borowski & Kott, 1976, p. 119)
In a series of correspondence with his parents, friends, and Rundo, we see him in those days that shaped his writing - Auschwitz, and a couple of years in Germany post-liberation. In all the Auschwitz letters, written in German, censored, and stamped, there is little about his state of mind.
Requests for food from his mother, greetings to his friends, and a note here and there about his well-being. Yet, even with the scrutiny, a passage would slip out every now and then. Having endured life in Auschwitz for a few months already, on January 23, 1944, he writes to his mother, “As you know, all’s well with me, I’m just a bit tired, and I fear I will never be the same as before.” (Drewnowski, 2007, p. 23)
The 21-year young man knew then that what was happening would alter his being forever. Then another letter, in May, to his friend, Zosia “…that which we regard as happiness probably, however, lies within us when we act contrary to all circumstances and retain our own self-worth. In spite of everything, I believe that everything that comes from the soul is eternal and indestructible. …Since my first letter, which I wrote home precisely a year ago, much has changed with me.” (Drewnowski, 2007, p. 26)
By the time Borowski was deported to Dachau in 1945, almost a million and a half Jews had been gassed in Auschwitz. He was a Polish political prisoner and survived the chambers but was deathly. In November 1945, he writes in a letter, "...only six months ago I was unable to stand on my feet, and I weighed little more than 35 kilos." (Drewnowski, 2007, p. 44)
Dachau was liberated by the Americans in May 1945. Borowski lived for a while in a displaced person camp in Munich and wrote his Auschwitz stories there.
Adrift in Munich, with many of his friends dead, with no news yet of Maria or his parents, he writes into the void to his friend Zosia, not knowing whether she is alive,
“The void around me grows ever greater, and I yearn for people who aren’t here and experiences that won’t return. The letters that I send daily … get lost, and the people to whom I write remain silent.” (Drewnowski, 2007, p. 38)
He returned to Poland in 1946. Maria, who had ended up in Sweden after liberation from Auschwitz, followed suit, and they were married in December 1946.
In the fifth part of the letter in 'Auschwitz, our home', the narrator says, “Despite the madness of war, we lived for a world that would be different. For a better world to come when all this is over … It is that very hope that makes people go without a murmur to the gas chambers … We were never taught how to give up hope, and this is why today we perish …” (Borowski & Kott, 1976, pp. 121–122)
He speaks of his conflicting view that hope for a better world kept people from resisting death in the camps.
After a brief period in the communist Polish Worker's Party, he was disillusioned by the new post-war world order. “The protagonist in his Munich poems realized very quickly that the creation of a new order is only fiction, a utopia.”. (Tadeusz Borowski | Porta Polonica, n.d., p. 5)
‘The better world’ never came around for Tadeusz Borowski.
He walked to the gas, turning on a stove’s valve to commit suicide on July 3, 1951. Just a few days after the birth of his daughter. He was 28.
He didn’t resist his gas chamber, but he had perhaps lost all meaning and all hope for a better world. We will never know.
[Complement this reading (with upcoming posts) on Borowski's contemporaries -Albert Camus and Saadat Manto. Both were caught in the vortex of mid-20th-century events in their countries, Algeria and India respectively. Camus was in France in the post-war years. Manto had just made the giant leap to Pakistan after the partition of India in 1947- he had the same stripped-back style and an eerily similar voice of anguish and disillusionment in his letters in the post-partition years between 1947-1950, as Tadeusz Borowski had in his post-war correspondence between 1945-1951.]
All three men shared a tragic destiny, dying young. One of suicide, another of an alcohol-induced failed liver and another of a car crash. None living to fulfill their blazing potential and yet leaving behind an amazing body of work in those limited years.]
Bibliography
Alvarez, A. (1976, February 29). The victim of a full European education. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/1976/02/29/archives/the-victim-of-a-full-european-education-this-way-for-the-gas-ladies.html
Borowski, T., & Kott, J. (1976). This way for the gas, ladies and gentlemen (B. Vedder & M. Kandel, Trans.). Penguin Books.
Drewnowski, T. (Ed.). (2007). Postal indiscretions: The correspondence of tadeusz borowski (A. Nitecki, Trans.). Northwestern University Press.
Here in our auschwitz and other stories | yale university press. (n.d.). Retrieved July 30, 2021, from https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300116908/here-our-auschwitz-and-other-stories
Pytell, T. E. (2012). Shame and beyond Shame. New German Critique, 117, 155–164.
Tadeusz borowski | porta polonica. (n.d.-a) https://www.porta-polonica.de/en/atlas-of-remembrance-places/tadeusz-borowski?page=5
Taylor, A. (n.d.). World war ii: The holocaust - the atlantic. Retrieved July 30, 2021, from https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2011/10/world-war-ii-the-holocaust/100170/
WIRTH, A., & CZERNIAWSKI, A. (1967). A discovery of tragedy(The incomplete account of Tadeusz Borowski). The Polish Review, 12(3), 43–52.