Tadeusz Borowski

Tadeusz Borowski's concentration camp stories were based on his own experiences surviving Auschwitz and Dachau. In spare, brutal prose he describes a world where where the will to survive overrides compassion and prisoners eat, work and sleep a few yards from where others are murdered; where the difference between human beings is reduced to a second bowl of soup, an extra blanket or the luxury of a pair of shoes with thick soles; and where the line between normality and abnormality vanishes. Published in Poland after the Second World War, these stories constitute a masterwork of world literature.

This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen

Devin Ware

It was a bizarre journey to read this directly after finishing "Man's Search for Meaning" by Viktor Frankl. To move from a book that was ultimately so positive and hopeful into one that is so broken and pained is a sobering experience. The more one reads about the Holocaust, the more it refuses classification, organization, or any attempt to simplify or understand it. Viktor Frankl found that a person can survive anything so long as they have a meaning in their life, and spent the rest of this life spreading that message. Borowski survived, married his fiancé who had also survived, and then committed suicide three days after she gave birth to their daughter. I will not claim to know everything he was thinking and feeling at the time; I can't even begin to imagine.

This book does not revel in the horrors it presents, and that is what makes it harder to read than most books. If it dangled its horrors in your face, then it would feel exploitative, and that is something that is more familiar to people. You would have people outraged on one side, and enjoying it on the other. But these stories do not do that. By opening it, you have walked through a door into a place where you may see all the things that humans are capable of doing to each other. Most of the time, we think we have seen this before, but we're never aware of how other artists cover up the worst things, or hide them behind implication, have them happen offscreen in the movie. Borowski chooses to hide nothing. You have come into this place, you wanted to learn about this, so Borowski does the cruelest and wisest thing, and allows you to see it.

I am haunted by this book. I am also motivated to do all I can to make the world a better place, in whatever way I am able. I rarely encounter a book that I believe "everyone should read," but this may be an exception. 

This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen

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