Human Dialogues Are Born
[In the following excerpt, Sanders discusses This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen in the context of twentieth-century Eastern European “literature of atrocity.”]
The plight of the survivor has become a familiar theme in the literature of the holocaust. According to Terrence des Pres, the survivor “is the first of civilized men to live beyond the compulsions of culture; beyond a fear of death which can only be assuaged by insisting that life itself is worthless.” Much of what has come to be known as the “literature of atrocity” has been written by Eastern Europeans who were themselves victims of Nazi persecution. It is not surprising, therefore, that descriptions of the most devastating assaults on human dignity are to be found in their works. In his preface to the recently republished paperback edition of Tadeusz Borowski's collection of stories, This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, Jan Kott quotes Borowski's admonition to survivors of death camps writing about their experiences: “The first duty of Auschwitzers is to make clear just what a camp is. … But let them not forget that 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, how you bought women, men, what you did in the barracks, unloading the transports, at the gypsy camp; tell about the daily life of the camp, 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 took his own advice. As soon as he came to the realization that “in this war … freedom, justice and human dignity had slid off man like a rotten rag,” he could easily understand, and even identify with, fellow inmates who hit upon a new way of burning people, or prisoners who discovered the taste of human brains. When heaps of tangled bodies become an everyday sight, the vision of a “weird snarl,” “a gigantic stew concocted out of the human crowd” is no longer just a nightmare.
Predictably, Borowski's early critics accused him of “amorality, decadence and nihilism.” We know that for years the regimes of Communist-dominated Eastern Europe banished despair from literature. Motivated by naive idealism and the worst kind of prudery, convinced that optimism can be decreed and heroism made to order, they indignantly described works like Borowski's as “destructive.” (Of course, resistance to depictions of unspeakable atrocities was strong in the West as well. For instance, the first edition of Jerzy Kosinski's The Painted Bird was heavily censored by its American publisher, and there is that ignorant and malicious country woman in Flannery O'Connor's gripping story, “The Displaced Person,” whose distaste for images of war is a grotesque parody of “progressive” attitudes. She recalls seeing a newsreel in which bodies of naked people were piled high, “a head thrust in here, a hand there, a foot, a knee, a part that should have been covered up sticking out, a hand raised clutching nothing,” and concludes that such things happened in Europe because people there were not as “advanced” as in America, their religion had not yet been “reformed.”)
Borowski wrote his Auschwitz stories right after the war. In a second wave of Eastern European holocaust fiction, which came ten-to-fifteen years later, l'univers concentrationnaire was enlarged to encompass Stalinist prison camps as well. The slogans had changed, but the affronts to sanity, the hero worship, the vilifications, the terror, were agonizingly familiar. For all their compulsively precise details, such Eastern European masterpieces as Piotr Rawicz's Blood from the Sky or Ladislav Fuks's Mr. Theodore Mundstock are open-ended and allegorical. Rawicz's haunting novel is about the odyssey of a survivor in a world he despises, yet its contours are indistinct. In a postscript the author pointedly reminds the reader that the events described “could crop up in any place, at any time, in the mind of any man. …” Ladislav Fuks's Theodore Mundstock is a Czech Jew who conquers his fear of the concentration camp by “preparing” for the experience: he sleeps on a plank, carries heavy suitcases and asks a baker to let him take out the loaves from the oven. But to comprehend—and thereby control—an absurd reality is impossible. Mundstock's “vain ‘heroic’ endeavors,” writes Lawrence Langer in his brilliant analysis of the novel, “can be read as a sinister parable for our time.”
More recent examples of Eastern European holocaust fiction tend once again to be personal and anecdotal. Powerful allegories have given way to tender tragedies. The authors of new novels about the tragedy of Eastern European Jewry in World War II are most often Jews living in Hungary, Romania, East Germany. Works on Jewish themes are rare enough in Eastern Europe; what lends the few that do appear a special poignancy is their elegiac tone, their undercurrents of anguish, their muted recriminations. The authors know that they cannot be too Jewish, or forget that anti-Semitism is after all a political phenomenon, so they make sure they present a “balanced” picture of wartime atrocities, making heroes and villains of Jews and gentiles alike. Still, the very choice of the subject can be seen as an act of courage, and the works themselves are the last echoes of an extensive Jewish culture. …
The persistent preoccupation of Eastern European writers with political repression, war, and the futile search for personal freedom may strike the Western reader as chastening, but somewhat redundant. Yet, in thinking of the finest examples of recent writing from Eastern Europe—from Tadeusz Konwicki's disjointed, dreamlike narratives about the terrible consequences of war to the Yugoslav Miodrag Bulatovic's seamy anti-war tales; from Ludvík Vaculík's stark political allegories to Stanislaw Lem's flamboyant science-fiction satires—one realizes that unconventional narrative techniques and startling shifts in authorial perspective can cast familiar subjects in new light, and that only by these means can certain realities be approached.
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Introduction to This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen
Writing and the Holocaust: How Literature Has (and Has Not) Met Its Greatest Challenge