This Way For The Gas

Tonight I finished the book, This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, by Thadeus Borowski. Borowski was a young Polish writer and scholar, imprisoned by the Nazis for attending underground university courses in Warsaw and held in Auschwitz throughout the war. In 1951, not long after being freed from Auschwitz, making it through the US controlled relocation camps and finally making it back home to reunite with his wife, he committed suicide.

It so happened that Borowski arrived just a few weeks after the camp had stopped sending "Aryans" to the gas chamber and hence was spared to a fate as a laborer in the camp. Though he was eventually allowed to receive packages of food from home, he still lived in a miserable state, surrounded by death, pushed to the limits of his strength, starving, and forced to sit idly by while inconceivable cruelties and sufferings occurred around him.

The beauty of these stories really comes in the way they portray the victims more so than in the way they portray the perpetrators. When I think of concentration camps, I like to think of there being a dignity in the survivors. I want to believe they maintained their humanity and lived heroically because of that. Meanwhile, I demonize the SS guards and gas chamber attendants. Of course, these men and women were forced into their plight and should not be held accountable, but the truth is that there is no such thing as dignity and humanity in such atrocious conditions, merely survival. Survival can entail a number of undignified and inhumane acts towards your fellow man, towards old friends, even family members.

The way in which Borowski captures the numbness, the mundane feeling of watching and even guiding several thousand people to a quick but painful death is truly disturbing. Though you want someone to intervene, it seems to make sense that largely people care more about the food, treasure or articles of clothing they can collect from those who will be dead in minutes. In truth, how the Holocaust even happened, the very idea of hating groups of people so much plus finding several thousand people to share in that hatred and act so cruelly just boggles my mind. I truly cannot conceive of perpetrating such atrocities. However, Borowski puts you in that camp and introduces you to the atrocities committed in simply surviving such a force. This, rather disturbingly, I could understand. In the end, I could not say whether it was more dignified to walk directly into the gas chamber to your death or to survive at the cost of your conceptions of humanity, society and decency. Honestly, I am not sure Borowski could answer this question either.

The line that I found most disturbing was spoken when referring to his lost friends with whom he used to debate politics and literature. He says, "And today I shall still challenge their acceptance of the infectious idea of the all-powerful, aggressive state, their awe for the evil whose only defect is that it is not our own." Borowski's friends seemed convinced that had they been in power and been able to persecute those who would persecute them, perhaps that would not be evil. Through his experiences Borowski knew evil infects both those who commit the acts and those against whom the acts are committed. This book will occupy my mind for some time as I try to figure out how or why such things occur, while recognizing such acts are still occurring today all over the world on scales both large and small. What can one do to protect that seemingly very fragile idea of humanity, both for those who would steal the notion from someone and those who have had the idea stolen from them?