Borowski's 'This Way For The Gas, Ladies And Gentlemen'

Blood chilling screams, families torn apart, horrifying murders are all parts of the Holocaust. David Faber, a courageous, young man tortured in a Nazi concentration camp shares the horrors he was exposed to, including his brother Romek’s murder, in the book Because of Romek, by himself David Faber. When Nazis invaded his hometown in Poland during World War II, David remained brave throughout his father’s arrest and his struggle to stay alive in the concentration camp. David’s mother inspired him with courage.

Tadeusz Borowski’s “This Way to the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen” is a story told by Tadek, the diminutive of Tadeusz, recounting the Nazi atrocities that took place in Auschwitz. In his rendering of daily life in Auschwitz, Borowski explains his role as a kapo: a non-Jewish inmate who works and schemes to survive amid daily slaughter. In the ‘concentration universe’ social relations are determined by access to basic goods needed for survival, like food and clothing, and by the surplus of these that can buy their possessor a place in society (Kennedy 160). Tadek works his way up the inmate social latter in order to survive in the camp for so long. His tactics include bartering for privileges and goods, lying and stealing. By doing this he is

The smoke from these crematories creates a blackness that hangs over the prison camp, calling back to the night metaphor. The hatred the Nazis possessed for the Jews can be seen as a fire- blackening human hearts, destroying cities and consuming millions upon millions of innocent lives. These events carried out by the Nazis also, understandably, sparked flames of hatred in their victims. The victim’s hatred towards the people who perpetrated these events are flames that may never be fully

Hate begins to grow, and in the case of the Holocaust, this incessant hatred led to the identification of all Jews, the deportation of millions of people from their homes, the concentration in the camps, and extermination of entire families and communities at once. For nearly a decade, Jews, prisoners-of-war, homosexuals, and the disabled were rounded up, sent off to camps, and systematically slaughtered in unimaginably inhumane ways. Elie Wiesel, a Holocaust survivor, shares his experiences at Auschwitz in the book Night, which reveals the true extent of inhumanity in both the Nazis and the Jews. In Elie Wiesel’s Night, Wiesel uses imagery of his experiences before and while being in the concentration camp in order to develop his theme of dehumanization of both the Jews and the Nazis during the Holocaust.

The atrocity expressed throughout Night, by Elie Wiesel, gives us a clear understanding into the levels of inhumane management which occurred in the times of World War II from the Germans. During the Holocaust, Hitler’s main objective was to make the Jews feel defective; he was ahead of the game. The Jews were tortured everyday for no reason at all other than for the SS officers’ own laughs. Wiesel exercises imagery, dialogue, and plot events to voice his own experience with the trauma of inhumanity.

Elie Wiesel once said, “I told him that I did not believe that they could burn people in our age, that humanity would never tolerate it ”. To Wiesel, it seemed impossible the dreadful events of the Holocaust could indeed happen and be accepted. In his autobiography Night, Elie Wiesel recalls his experiences while imprisoned as a young Jewish boy during World War II. ELiezer, the young Wiesel, is seized from is small Transylvanian town and transported the the concentration camp Birkenau. This story describes the harshness and cruelty of the concentration camps in Nazi Germany and the effects that those environments had on the imprisoned Jews.

The Holocaust was one of the largest genocides in history. An estimated eleven million people were killed- six million of these people being Jewish. Not only were millions murdered, but hundreds of thousands who survived the concentration camps were forever scarred by the dehumanizing events that they saw, committed, and lived through. In the novel “Night” by Elie Wiesel, Wiesel recounts the spine-chillingly horrific events of the Holocaust that affected him first-hand, in an attempt to make the reality of the Holocaust clear and understandable to those who could not believe it. What was arguably one of the worst punishments the victims of the Holocaust faced, was how they were dehumanized within concentration camps. To dehumanize means to steal away the attributes that make one human, be it loyalty, faith, kindness, or even our love for one another and ourselves. The inhumane treatment of the Jews alongside millions of other victims by the Nazi’s was rooted from the systematic dehumanization of these groups. Although the extent of the brutality cannot ever be fully understood by those uninvolved, Wiesel’s terrifying record of his involvement proves how the unlivable conditions in Auschwitz not only typically concluded with death, but on the way stole the Jews’ faith, forced them to turn on one another in an attempt at survival, and even tore apart the previously unbreakable bond between family members.

INTRO:Tadeusz Borowski is a polish poet and short story writer who grew up in a time during the holocaust. He published most of his works for the underground press as they were brutally honest from his personal experience. He struggled in search of good moral values despite his Nazi occupation. In his short story “This way for the gas, ladies and gentlemen” was set in a concentration camp in Auschwitz. The narrator was a polish prisoner who worked under Nazi rule, we can assume it is based on Borowski’s real life.

Part III of Niewyk’s book is about the victim’s experiences in the camps. Four articles are presented. The first is by Bruno Bettelheim, a child psychologist and survivor of the Holocaust, who concludes via Freudian psychology that victims in the camps reverted to childlike behavior due to their circumstances. The second is by Terrence Des Pres, a literature professor, who refutes Bettelheim’s position by adding additional information Bettelheim did not include. Next is Primo Levi, another survivor, who details a “moral grey zone” of actions taken while in the camps. Last in the chapter is Zoe Vania Waxman, who focuses on women’s experiences in the Holocaust and how their actions did not always fit in the gender stereotype that women are always

In the documentary This Way for the Gas Ladies and Gentlemen, Tadeusz Borowski gathers multiple different experiences whether it was directly or indirectly of the Holocaust. The Holocaust was a genocide in which Adolf Hitler Nazi’s Germany and its collaborators during World War II killed six million jews. One of the most important aspects of this autobiography is the identification of the author as actually the main character. He is one of the prisoners at the concentration camp in Auschwitz where numerous jews are being exterminated. He had to learn how to accept this style of living to make it “home”, even though he was not Jewish.

The sole factor that separated Tadeusz Borowski from the gas chambers when he was at Auschwitz—beyond the fact that he wasn’t Jewish—was his cooperation with the S.S. soldiers. He assisted the Nazis in eliminating thousands of Jewish men, women, and children. “This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen” ultimately uses the narrator to convey Borowski’s message of what really happened during the Holocaust. This also explains why the story is in first person: it reflects the author’s own experiences. Borowski’s writing is quite crude: harsh yet realistic. Readers cannot judge Borowski negatively; he was as much of a victim as the people coming off the transports.

The holocaust was an event that undoubtedly left a mark on millions of people’s lives. But among those people, those most affected were the survivors who, by chance, could walk away from Auschwitz with their lives. Upon reflection of the tragedies we now know occurred within the Jewish internment camps, one can only imagine the scarring effects that must have been left on the survivors. Through three texts I was able to identify a conversation of just how deteriorating the Jewish internment camps were to those who managed to live through them.

Primo Levi, in his novel Survival in Auschwitz (2008), illustrates the atrocities inflicted upon the prisoners of the concentration camp by the Schutzstaffel, through dehumanization. Levi describes “the denial of humanness” constantly forced upon the prisoners through similes, metaphors, and imagery of animalistic and mechanistic dehumanization (“Dehumanization”). He makes his readers aware of the cruel reality in the concentration camp in order to help them examine the psychological effects dehumanization has not only on those dehumanized, but also on those who dehumanize. He establishes an earnest and reflective tone with his audience yearning to grasp the reality of genocide.

In the content and amusement of the supervisor we may perceive not only happiness at the suffering of others, but genuine amusement. He realized how dehumanization was essential to carry out the Nazis plan of “Industrialization”, and used every opportunity to flaunt his power. A big decision was made to start burning corpses to try and hide what was happening “The murderers had begun to look for ways to burn the corpses of people”12. Even after the people have died, they do not rest in peace. Their corpses were to be exhumed and then burned.

One of the first and most important themes that came across the book was when Mosihe the Beadle returned from Passover in Budapest. He brought back with him news that the Germans had taken over with the Hungarian Governments approval. That take over was accompanied by the chilling news that “Anti-Semitic acts take place every day, in the streets, on the trains. The Fascist attack Jewish stores, synagogues. The Situation is becoming very serious…” (Wiesels 9). While Mosihe tried to warn his friends and fellow citizens, they mistook him for being just a crazy old fool and he soon became a laughing stock. However, “in less than three days, German Army vehicles made their appearance on our streets” (Wiesels 9). The image of an enemy army rolling through one’s home streets seemed impossible as well as a laughing matter to people of Mosihe community. The community’s denial to Mosihe’s claims sends the message to the reader to not tread lightly on the problems of today. Global warming, global financial collapse, or in extreme cases a third world war, all of these events seem like laughing matters to most of the population today, but very few people, like Mosihe the Beadle, see these unfolding before them, and do their best to warn their fellow people all while being completely