Jews, despite the brutality with which they are met. An old woman being sent to the gas chambers is forced to carry the bodies of the dead babies retrieved from the train cars. However, she shows the narrator pity for the work he must do; '"My poor boy,' she whispers and smiles at me.'' A beautiful young woman catches the narrator's attention, and she asks him where they are going. When the narrator doesn't answer, '‘‘I know,' she says with a shade of proud contempt in her voice, tossing her head.’’ Then she chooses to join the other doomed Jews by "boldly'' walking to the trucks. A one-legged girl who is being taken to the truck politely addresses the men who carry her. "Tears are running down her face’’ and she tells the men they are hurting her, but she still address them as "Sir." Such instances of sympathy, dignity, and courtesy are seen nowhere else this day except at the ramp and except from the Jews.

Only in one instance does a Jew show a real lack of humanity. A woman denies that a little boy is her own, even as the child "runs after her, wailing loudly: 'Mama, mama, don't leave me!'’’ By contrast, the Nazis and the camp inmates display such savagery almost constantly throughout the day. In a rage, a burly prisoner-worker physically attacks this woman. He verbally castigates her as well for abandoning her child, accusing her of immoral behavior at the same time that he tosses her into the truck and consigns her to death. In a moment of bitter irony, an SS officer applauds the prisoner's actions and calls the woman a "degenerate."

Some of the brutality committed by the officers, guards, or prisoners is rendered even more heinous because of the casual manner in which it is dispensed. As the cattle cars roll into the station, an SS officer hears the cries and moans of Jews inside. The officer ‘‘jerks his head impatiently, his lips twist in annoyance,’’ before signaling a guard to riddle the train car with shots from an automatic rifle. As the Jews are sent to their death, another officer stands with a notebook in hand. "For each departing truck he enters a mark; sixteen gone means one thousand people, more or less. The gentleman is calm, precise.’’ The SS man who orders the narrator to give the dead babies to one of the women does so while examining his cigarette lighter "carefully."

A little girl comes to metaphorically represent the madness teeming on the ramp. She has pushed herself out through the train's window and fallen out to the gravel before regaining her feet and ‘‘walking around in a circle, faster and faster, waving her rigid arms around in the air." As the narrator realizes that ‘‘[h]er mind has given way,’’ an SS officer "calmly" kicks her down and then shoots her dead.

Language is yet another example of the schizophrenic nature of the camp. The ‘‘multilingual throng'' can hardly understand each other and must manufacture new modes of communication, which are generally unreliable and ineffective. The prisoners speak in a medley of languages, sometimes mimicking the German of their captors, sometimes relying on ‘‘crematorium Esperanto.’’ The prisoners also are unable to forge real communication with the Jews, who are really their partners in victimization and abuse. ‘‘Sir, what's going to happen to us?'' the Jews coming off the train ask the workers. ‘‘I don't know, I don't understand,’’ is the only answer they will receive. Explains the narrator, "It is the camp law: people going to their death must be deceived to the very end.’’ One old man keeps repeating a German phrase, "I wish to speak with the commandant,’’ drawing the derisive laughter of an SS officer. Though this man speaks the language of the Nazis, the two parties will never be able to communicate. In reality, no one at the camp can have hopes of understanding one another—Auschwitz is beyond true human comprehension.

In the midst of this manifestation of hell, the narrator is forced to confront his reaction to the situation—the anger he has for the Jews. He explains to Henri, "I am furious, simply furious with these people—furious because I must be here because of them. I feel no pity. I am not sorry they're going to the gas chamber. Damn them all!’’ He recognizes that his feelings ‘‘must be pathological,’’ but is assured by Henri that actually, such feelings are ‘‘natural, predictable ... The ramp exhausts you, you rebel—and the easiest way to relieve your hate is to turn against someone weaker.'' This brief exchange shows the process by which prisoners in Auschwitz change from normal humans who experience and act upon a social conscience to humans who are cut off from any moral core. Henri may be correct that the narrator's reaction is natural, but that does not make the narrator's confession any less shocking.
Despite his words, the narrator is strongly affected by the events that he is helping to bring about. Even if his mind maintains its distance from what is going on around him, his body does respond as if in physical pain. He vomits, a metaphorical representation of his attempt to rid himself of his guilt and his responsibility in the death of 15,000 Jews from Sosnoweic-Bedzin. Like that little girl, his mind gives way in his sudden longing for the camp "as a haven of peace.’’

In stories such as ‘‘This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen,’’ Borowski, writes Laurence Langer in "Auschwitz: The Death of Choice,'' ‘‘mercilessly confronts us with moments of dehumanization ... the terror of extermination generated consequences that leave us morally speechless.’’ Readers may be tempted to evaluate, even judge, the narrator's actions at the ramp. The circumstances that Borowski and others like him faced, however, clearly show that Auschwitz was another world, one which the average person could never understand.

Source: Rena Korb, Critical Essay on ‘‘This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen,’’ in Short Stories for Students, The Gale Group, 2001.
Korb has a master's degree in English literature and creative writing and has written for a wide variety of educational publishers.

After reading the cycle of Auschwitz stories in Polish writer Tadeusz Borowski's collection This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, many critics understandably focus on the author's apparently amazing detachment from the gruesome subject matter, as well as on his extreme pessimism about human nature. Borowski's thinly veiled autobiographical stories about life as a non-Jew sentenced to a Nazi concentration camp are breathtaking in their horror; Borowski propels the reader into a world so foreign from his or her own that the first-person view of the atrocities committed by both prisoners and perpetrators can be described only as relentless.

But in the world of the labor camp, where there are no heroes, or at least no characters who die by choice for a righteous cause, Borowski's view of human nature might not be quite as bleak as could be interpreted from a cursory reading of the text. There is no denying that Borowski's picture of what men will do to each other to survive is far from inspiring, and he does view the stories' events through his narrator with a sometimes impassive tone.

Nevertheless, a close examination of the first story (with the same title as the collection) shows that Borowski draws on a variety of techniques to offer some, if scant, relief from the unblinking detachment of his narrator, and to expose, however briefly, the narrator's humanness in the most inhumane of conditions. For if he did not, on the rare occasion, show some human feeling amid the horror he witnesses, no one would blame the overwhelmed reader for crying out, as the narrator does, ‘‘My God, man, I am finished, absolutely finished!’’ And when a man decides he is finished at Auschwitz, there is no honorable way to die; survival is the only way of honor. The narrator makes a conscious decision, through his anger as well as by his holding tight to small pieces of his own humanity, not to become a "Muslim,’’ the camp name for a prisoner who has been physically and spiritually destroyed.

Borowski makes clear in his description of Auschwitz that the setting is, if not actually hell, a good representation of it. The temperature is blisteringly hot, and ‘‘[t]he sun ... illuminates the ramp with a reddish glow; the shadows of the trees have become elongated, ghostlike ... the human cries seem to rise all the way to the sky.’’ In fact, Borowski even creates a hierarchy in this Inferno, and places his narrator (who is never called by name in the first story but is known to be a Polish non-Jew) in a position somewhat removed from the squalor and deprivation of many of his fellow prisoners.

In an early scene, the narrator surveys from his top bunk bed the swarming men below him, almost insect-like in their anonymity. ‘‘All of us walk around naked. The delousing is finally over, and our striped suits are back from the tanks of Cyclone B solution, an efficient killer of lice in clothing and of men in gas chambers.’’ Lawrence L. Langer writes in his article ‘‘Auschwitz: The Death of Choice’’ that the narrator's apparent cynicism "is not merely a literary device; it represents an honest attempt to suggest how Auschwitz 'denatured' human character.’’

According to Langer, Borowski has created ‘‘an unrecognizable Eden’’ where the occupants, instead of naming the animals they see, ‘‘become confused with them.'' While he and his friend Henri enjoy their bread, tomatoes, and bacon—treasures acquired in exchange for helping move the Jews from the boxcars to their ultimate deaths—he looks out over those below, the "naked, sweat-drenched men [who] crowd in the narrow barracks aisle.’’ Borowski immediately identifies the narrator and his friend as part of the prisoner elite.

Relief from the nightmarish setting of the concentration camp appears in small glimpses of nature that have not been corrupted by man. When the narrator becomes part of the work detail assigned to unloading new Jewish prisoners from the boxcars, he passes "a small square framed by tall chestnuts and paved with yellow gravel.'' In fact, the narrator tries to inject a bit of ironic levity into the situation, calling the building where the Jews will be unloaded prior to their march to the ovens, ‘‘a cheerful little station, very much like any other provincial railway stop.’’

Later in that scene, the narrator sees a similar grove of trees and describes them in an almost bucolic manner, as "the green shade of the Silesian chestnuts.’’ At the end of the day, ‘‘[t]he evening has come, cool and clear,’’ an appreciated contrast to the hellish temperatures of daytime. ‘‘The stars are out ... It is incredibly quiet.’’ But if the contrast between human depravity and nature isn't strong enough, Borowski adds a political analogy; he uses the word "Canada'' throughout the story to refer to the labor gang members who unload the trains and to any sign of wealth and well-being at the camps. This Canada, however, ‘‘smells not of maple forests but of French perfume, [and] has amassed great fortunes in diamonds and currency from all over Europe.’’

Just as ‘‘This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen’’ presents no heroes, it also contains no villains. To include them, according to Andrzej Wirth in his essay ‘‘A Discovery of Tragedy,’’ would have resulted in ‘‘a pale and pretentious sentimentality'' and "a demonization of the criminal ... [which would be] an inadequate solution.’’ The Nazi system of extermination and governance becomes the distant villain, and all who participate in it—whether desperate inmate laborers like the narrator and Henri, newly arrived Jewish prisoners, or brutal German guards—are victims in Borowski's story. Nonetheless, Borowski includes a few people in the story whose presence breaks up the continuous parade of death and decay.

Henri is a fat Frenchman who has the morals of an alley cat but, importantly, he is the narrator's only friend. While it could be argued that their relationship is strictly related to their survival, Henri is the person the narrator turns to when his sense of self begins to crack during the horrific work they are doing on the train ramp, asking, "Listen Henri, are we good people?'' Granted, Henri's response is a bit cold-hearted, but this exchange allows the narrator to make himself vulnerable, if even for a brief moment, while he ponders his part in the horrible play of evil around him. He questions why he hates so much and how he can have no pity for the people he prepares for the gas chambers. ‘‘It must be pathological, I just can't understand.''

After trying to brush him off, Henri assures the narrator that his reactions are "natural, predictable, calculated ... Why, I'd even call it healthy.’’ Henri understands the narrator's emotional fragility at this point; he has not developed quite the tough veneer that Henri possesses. Henri goes beyond telling the narrator that his worries are useless and attempts to make his friend feel better—a tiny moment of tenderness, however perverse. Later in the conversation the narrator becomes even too bitter for Henri, and Henri gently reminds his friend that he has suffered hunger and has frantically stuffed himself with found food, much like the Greeks he condemns.

Three women, like shadows from a life the narrator feels is completely lost, also provide a few moments of solace for the narrator, as well as brief respites for readers from the story's dark, unrelenting progression. After the beginning scene recounting the use of the Cyclone B to kill both lice and men, the narrator cuts a piece of bread sent to him by his mother. (He is one of the elite prisoners allowed packages in the camp.) He is angered by a rabbi's loud chanting and praying in the bunk below his, but pauses to reminisce, "only a week ago my mother held this white loaf in her hands ... dear Lord, dear Lord.’’ His reverie is broken by Henri plotting how they will acquire real French champagne the next time a train load of Jews comes from France.

The other two women appear among the people unloaded from the boxcars later that day. The narrator is ordered to clean up the human remains left on one of the trains after everyone alive has disembarked. This horrific scene has the prisoners picking up dead infants, unsure of what to do with them. "We carry them out like chickens, holding several in each hand,’’ he says. The prisoners are instructed to hand them over to the women who have just come off the train, but the women are frightened and refuse to take the bodies.

An SS officer threatens to shoot the women if they don't take the dead babies, but an older woman steps in to diffuse the situation. ‘‘A tall, gray-haired woman takes the little corpses out of my hands and for an instant gazes straight into my eyes. 'My poor boy,' she whispers and smiles at me.’’ Her calm wisdom is a welcome contrast to the hysterical scene unfolding on the ramp.

The narrator has experienced a moment of genuine connection with another human being, someone that has sympathy for him, but the result is almost too much for him to grasp. Immediately after this incident, the narrator turns to Henri for the conversation about whether they are good people. And even though the narrator rants about how much he hates the people he unloads from the trains, his anger is a clear signal that his soul is not completely hardened; at least he is able to have an emotional response, indicating there is still something human left inside him.

The third woman who creates a pause in the narration appears suddenly, as if in a dream, and "descends lightly from the train.'' She acts as if she has just disembarked at a regular train station, looking around at the huge crowd for her friends, whom she expects to be there any minute. "With a natural gesture she runs her hands down her blouse, casually straightens her skirt,’’ the narrator notices, and then she looks directly at him and asks where they will be taken. He is speechless and cannot answer. All he can think of is her beauty contrasted with the ugliness of the gas chambers and the foul-smelling concentration camp. In a flash, he notices a gold watch on her wrist and sadly thinks "Why did she bring it? ... They'll take it from her anyway.’’ When she realizes her fate, she confidently walks to the trucks taking people directly to the gas chambers. Her actions are of some creature from another planet, a planet the narrator feels he has left long ago and can only remember in snippets. But her appearance softens him for a moment, as he appreciates her normalcy and animation amid the concentration camp's decay.

Borowski writes with a tone of "apparent cynicism, moral indifference, and an uncontrollable moral insanity,’’ according to Wirth. And Mark Shechner in his review of the collection in The Nation observes ‘‘how cool Borowski is, how ironic!'' But this tough facade is developed for good reason; if the narrator (and Borowski, during his time at Auschwitz) ever lets his guard down, allows anyone at the camp to see his humanity and his tenderness, his survival will be in jeopardy. ‘‘Yet this cool is not at all dispassionate but rather guarded and mature. It is a manner forged under extreme vigilance,’’ according to Shechner.

However, Shechner goes on to argue that anger, sympathy, and guilt are ‘‘the most useless emotions of all to the totally dominated.’’ Only part of this statement is accurate, though, as the narrator shows time and time again that, while sympathy and guilt are certainly ineffective, his anger saves him from becoming a "Muslim." Henri stokes the narrator's anger toward the Jews he unloads from the trains, because he knows that any sensible man who stops, even for a moment, to think of the atrocities he is abetting to support his existence will be utterly destroyed. In a perverse sense, Henri is right, and the narrator's well-developed hatred is nothing if not "healthy." In the black-is-white and white-is-black world of the death camps, where beauty looks so out of place, mothers cannot safely claim their children's bodies, and a Red Cross truck carries the gas to the crematoriums, mental health is measured in a way that would seem insane outside the barbed wire.

Source: Susan Sanderson, Critical Essay on "This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen,’’ in Short Stories for Students, The Gale Group, 2001.
Sanderson holds a Master of Fine Arts degree in fiction writing and is an independent writer.

[Borowski's] stories, while they can be arranged to give the illusion of beginning, middle, and end, are really memory shards in which he retraces his guilt, reacts aggressively against it, and mocks himself profoundly as an artist in a world of stone.

[In "This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen,’’ we see] how a young man, the narrator Tadek, incorporated Auschwitz ... Tadek, who works at the ramp, actively participates in sending thousands to their deaths. Yet the non-metaphysically inclined Tadek also arrives at metaphysical intimations; for the magnitude of decreation around him evokes such resonances in "This Way for the Gas,'' internalizes them in "A Visit,'' and disgorges them in aggressive apocalyptic visions in ‘‘The World of Stone.’’

The uncreating world of the concentrationary universe is a world of lies and deceit, as is already evident in the title of "This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen,’’ and is confirmed as the reader
becomes conscious of the fact that within the twenty pages of this short story 15,000 people have been gassed. Speed intensifies throughout the narrative as Tadek races through the account of his participation in preparing the victims of three transports for their deaths. In the beginning he and his composers seem to eagerly await the first transport, for also at the ramp is "Canada,'' the land of plenty, where the inmates get supplies for survival. The narrator's tone is objective, casual, and cynical ... Typical of Borowski's style is the climactic but ironic use of parallelisms. [A distant] church steeple obviously points to something that transcends this world. But whatever that might be, it has no contact with the two groups of men who conspire within this confined, narrow ground of evil.

After the wagons have been emptied, the inmates must clean up the "Schweinerei" (pig's mess); the physical and moral stain must appear to have been removed. Among the human refuse in the wagon, Tadek finds ‘‘squashed, trampled infants, naked little monsters, with enormous heads and bloated bellies. We carry them out like chickens, holding several in each hand.’’ ... Pity is consistently undercut as the narrator moves from infants to monsters, to chickens, and to the seemingly unaffected diversionary attitude of the SS man who sees but does not choose to see. Shocked, the women refuse to take the little bodies; but a tall, grey-haired woman accepts them and addresses Tadek as ‘‘my poor boy,’’ a personalized phrase that overwhelms him, not with tears, but with intense, physical fatigue and with the refusal to look at people individually.

With the arrival of the second transport brutality increases and deception diminishes. A woman, aware that she would go to the gas chamber if defined as a mother, denies her child but is killed by a Russian inmate. As Tadek once again struggles with nausea, there emerges from the train a girl that belongs to another time and world. She "descends lightly from the train, hops to the gravel, looks around inquiringly as if somewhat surprised. Her soft, blond hair has fallen on her shoulders in a torrent.'' Her wise and mature look defines her as in the know as she insists on going to the gas chamber. She is a totally absurd but true appearance of personhood and dignity in this world of deceit; her knowledge, however, leads her to seek death ... [Only] the human being can contain such knowledge, for there is no god who contains or refuses to contain so much suffering.

This is particularly evident after Tadek has cleaned up the wagons of the second transport and rests against the rails: "The sun has leaned low over the horizon and illuminates the ramp with a reddish glow: the shadows of the trees have become elongated, ghostlike. In the silence that settles over nature at this time of day, the human cries seem to rise all the way to the sky.'' ... No ear will receive the cries that rise from this constricted and seemingly eternal narrow ground. Tadek, who sees all this, describes it in a language resonant with religious connotations, a language similar to the images of Nelly Sachs in "Landscape of Screams''; for the precision of Borowski's attempt to imitate reality and Sachs's precise use of the literalness of the word approximate each other.

Nausea is a momentary and illusory relief for a man who has made such a world part of his being that his sense of ego has been lost. In the sketches ‘‘A Visit’’ and ‘‘The World of Stone,’’ Tadek describes the state of such a man after liberation. He admits in "A Visit'' that "I have never been able to look at myself.’’ ... Self-knowledge is a myth for the former concentration camp inmate, for his self is constituted of what he saw. "A Visit'' is a visit of the people who claimed his kinship, as is evident in the twice-repeated whisper of a dying man: "Brother, brother.’’ Tadek had to fail as his brother's keeper, for he had thousands of brothers and sisters who claimed his kinship. As the repetition of "I saw, I saw, I saw'' reveals, Tadek has only been able to fulfill the final request of the victims, namely, that he remember what happened. He is now housed in his memory but is unhoused in his present world as he sits ‘‘in someone else's room,’’ where in a moment he will feel "homesick for the people I saw then.’’ He can visit them all, and they will be his visitation. Because he is defined through them alone, because there is no room for self-knowledge, his consciousness is nothing but a house for the memory of the victims. The world that once swallowed him is now contained within him.

In "The World of Stone'' the alienated narrator reacts aggressively against the ‘‘intimate immensity" (Bachelard) of himself as the anagogic container of the world of Auschwitz. Growing within him "like a foetus inside a womb'' is the terrible knowledge and foreboding that ‘‘the Infinite Universe is inflating at incredible speed.’’ He wants to retain it like "a miser,'' afraid that solid matter will dissolve into emptiness like a ‘‘fleeting sound.’’ Demonic knowledge crowds and pressures the confines of his being, a knowledge that cannot be transformed into the logos of speech because it would not generate an individualized creation; rather, it would generate a chaos of emptiness, reminiscent of smoke and air or the cries that rose all the way to the sky from the ground of Auschwitz.

[In ‘‘The World of Stone’’] Tadek is left with the choice of chaos as void or a world of stone, the latter symbolized by the ‘‘massive cool building made of granite'' where he works. But granite does not protect him; he knows it "cannot keep the world from swelling and bursting like an over-ripe pomegranate, leaving behind but a handful of contracted, grey, dry ashes,’’ an image which is a grotesque inversion of Mallarmé's "Afternoon of a Faun.'' In Borowski's world of stone there may be a volcanic eruption of aggression, there may be ashes, but no queen of love visits the daydreamer.

Tadek concludes that, because the world has not yet blown away, he intends to write and "grasp the true significance of the events and people I have seen.’’ His matter is great and worthy of ‘‘an immortal epic,'' but the act of writing would mean a concession to the illusion of normality in which he does not want to participate. Tadek and the other victim/survivors of the concentrationary universe have not left us, who are still caught in the illusion of reprieve, the conclusive comfort of a great epic. They have left us partial visions, short stories, sketches, and fragments and retained ‘‘with a miser's piercing anxiety’’ ... the world which swallowed them and which they swallowed with open eyes.

Source: Hamida Bosmajian, "The Rage for Order: Autobiographical Accounts of the Self in the Nightmare of History,’’ in Metaphors of Evil: Contemporary German Literature and the Shadow of Nazism, University of Iowa Press, 1979.

Borowski was the greatest hope of Polish literature among the generation of his contemporaries decimated by the war ... [His] Auschwitz stories, however, are not only a masterpiece of Polish—and of world—literature. Among the tens of thousands of pages written about the holocaust and the death camps, Borowski's slender book continues to occupy, for more than a quarter century now, a place apart. The book is one of the cruelest of testimonies to what men did to men, and a pitiless verdict that anything can be done to a human being.

[Borowski's first volume of poetry], Wherever the Earth, predicted in classical cadences the extermination of mankind. Its dominant image was that of a gigantic labor camp. Already, in that first volume of poetry, there was no hope, no comfort, no pity. The last poem, ‘‘A song,’’ concluded with a prophecy delivered like a sentence: ‘‘We'll leave behind us iron scrap / and the hollow, mocking laugh of generations.’’

Borowski's Auschwitz stories are written in the first person. The narrator of three of the stories is a deputy Kapo, Vorarbeiter Tadeusz. 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. ‘‘It is impossible to write about Auschwitz impersonally,’’ Borowski wrote in a review of one of the hagiographic books about the camp. "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.’’

In Borowski's Auschwitz stories the difference between executioner and victim is stripped of all greatness and pathos; it is brutally reduced to a second bowl of soup, an extra blanket, or the luxury of a silk shirt and shoes with thick soles, about which Vorarbeiter Tadeusz is so proud.
Borowski describes Auschwitz like an entomologist. The image of ants recurs many times, with their incessant march, day and night, night and day, from the ramp to the crematorium and from the barracks to the baths. The most terrifying thing in Borowski's stories is the icy detachment of the author. ‘‘You can get accustomed to the camp,’’ says Vorarbeiter Tadeusz. Auschwitz is presented from a natural perspective—a day like any other. Everything is commonplace, routine normal. ‘‘... [First just one ordinary barn, brightly whitewashed—and here they proceed to asphyxiate people. Later, four large buildings, accommodating twenty thousand at a time without any trouble. No hocus-pocus, no poison, no hypnosis. Only several men directing traffic to keep operations running smoothly, and the thousands flow along like water from an open tap.’’

Borowski called his book about Auschwitz "a voyage to the limit of a particular experience.’’ At the limit of that experience Auschwitz is no exception but the rule. History is a sequence of Auschwitzes, one following the other.

Source: Jan Kott, "Introduction," in ‘‘This Way to the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen,'' and Other Stories, translated by Barbara Vedder, with the Introduction translated by Michael Kandel, Penguin Books, 1976, pp. 11-26.