Tadeusz BorowskiReseñas

Surely one of the finest exemplars of Holocaust literature. Points up the collusion, ambiguity, cruelty and indifference of non-Jews, who were treated "better" overall, but were still caught up in the hell of Auschwitz/Birkenau. A short and powerful collection of stories, it caused me several sleepless nights and no doubt will continue to do so. I was stunned by the raw power of the prose and the author's iron determination to live so as to tell the world what happened there. Absolutely essential reading.

4 ⭐ This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen
I had read this before in an anthology. It's very striking; the"Canadians," those that are stronger and healthier than others, get favored. They will not be gassed and burned; at least not at first. They clear out the railroad cars that bring the Jews to the camps. They get to keep whatever food the prisoners still have.
3 ⭐ A Day at Harmenz
Harmenz is the village by the camp. This story visits a day with the railroad crew. Moving the roundabout/turnabout; clearing out the ditch; building a dike... Lunchtime, and a few get seconds, of nettle soup. Lining up to be searched, and one of the crew is discovered to have a stolen goose in his sack. Two workers are killed, one by putting a board across his throat, and the guard placing his feet on either end and rocking. A selection from the barracks is taken in the evening, for the"cremo."
3 ⭐ The People Who Walked On
The narrator is one of the "Canadians": those deemed strong enough to work, so spared from the ovens, at least in the interim. He describes one of the women's camps: they call it the Persian market. The reason being, the women are dressed in sleeveless summer dresses, it being summertime, and they stand around in between the barracks, across the barbed wire fence from where they are working. Sometimes they are working on roofing their barracks, and the women beg from them: "you've been here for a while, you surely have everything you need. I'm starving, can't you give me something?"
While working, they observe the lines of women, children and old men walking on the two rodeways: one directly to the gas, the other to the camps.
"Often, in the middle of the night, I walked outside; the lamps glowed in the darkness above the barbed-wire fences. The roads were completely black, but I could distinctly hear the far-away hum of a thousand voices -- the procession moved on and on. And then the entire sky would light up; there would be a burst of flame above the wood... And terrible human screams."
3 ⭐ Auschwitz, Our Home (A Letter)
A letter, or Surely, a series of letters from the narrator to his " girl". If this is a letter, it would use up 200 pieces of paper. The narrator commonly has trouble finding someone to deliver the letter to his girl in the female barracks.
He talks about the unbelievable chaos that controls Auschwitz, to where he has been sent to be trained as a medic.
"We shall be entrusted with a lofty mission: to nurse back to health our fellow inmates who may have the 'misfortune' to become ill, suffer from severe apathy, or feel depressed about life in general. It will be up to us -- The chosen 10 out of Birkenau's 20,000 -- to lower the camp's mortality rate and to raise the prisoners' morale. Or, in short, that is what we were told by the S.S. doctor upon our departure from birkenau."
And this, reminding me of my youth and my naivety, when I believed that the world of the future would be a world of better treatment for the Great Unwashed.
"Much of what I once said was naive, immature. And it seems to me now that perhaps we were not really wasting time. Despite the madness of war, we lived for a world that would be different. For a better world to come when all this is over. And perhaps even our being here is a step towards that world. Do you really think that, without the hope that such a world is possible, that the rights of man will be restored again, we could stand the concentration camp even for one day? It is that very hope that makes people go without a murmur to the gas chambers, keeps them from risking a revolt, paralyzes them into numb inactivity. It is hope that breaks down family ties, makes mother's renounce their children, or wives sell their bodies for bread, or husbands kill. It is hope that compels man to hold on to one more day of life, because that day may be the day of liberation."
3 ⭐ The Death of Schillinger
Schillinger is chief commanding officer of section d of Birkenau. He gets a fine comeuppance, when he tries to grab onto a naked jewess.
2 ⭐ The Man with the Package
2 ⭐ The Supper
2 ⭐ A True Story
4 ⭐ Silence
2 ⭐ The January Offensive
"... The whole world is really like the concentration camp; the weak work for the strong, and if they have no strength or will to work -- then let them steal, or let them die.
The world is ruled by neither Justice nor morality; crime is not punished nor virtue rewarded, one is forgotten as quickly as the other. The world is ruled by power and power is obtained with money. To work is senseless, because money cannot be obtained through work but through exploitation of others. And if we cannot exploit as much as we wish, at least let us work as little as we can. Moral duty? We believe neither in the morality of man, nor in the morality of systems. In German cities the store windows are filled with books and religious objects, but the smoke from the crematoria still hovers above the forests.."
3 ⭐ A Visit
4 ⭐ The World of Stone

This is a grim little book. It is best described as a few fictional stories and some short pieces, not quite stories sometimes, primarily about life in Auschwitz/Birkenau from the first person perspective of one of the camp's non-Jewish inmates (this is important). As a non-Jew the narrator's lot is considerably better than most, while still being abominable.

The stories are plainly told, matter of fact almost, without much commentary on the situation, etc. The author's approach is very effective at communicating the eerie everyday-ness of concentration camp life: "just another day unloading 3 or 4 trains of people for the gas chambers." Borowski lets the context, the very seeming ordinariness of these dreadful experiences, emphasize the appalling nature of the tasks and situations. And in the end everybody is just getting by as best they can.

A recurring theme is the docility of the people being herded to their doom. After all, people had nothing to lose by attempting to attack their executioners. Why didn't they? Borowski details people taking their last feeble possessions with them as they wait in line to be gassed. Why? What feeble hope was there? Each one seems to feel that however unlikely they are going to be saved somehow. And we are horrified because we know they will not be.

In one poignant scene, made all the more striking by being the lone example in the book, a young woman surprises her lecherous oppressor on the Auschwitz train unloading ramp by striking him and taking his gun. She shoots him and of course is shot, but none of the people surrounding her that already know they are being herded to their death, rise up with her. They ignore it, avert their gaze; not wanting to get involved.

Why do we read books like this? I don't buy the: "it's my duty to read this so it doesn't happen again." BS. There is some dirty little voyeur aspect to fiction or non-fiction like this. Death camp stories. True stories. People like this stuff. They want to read it; wish there was more of it. We tell ourselves it's okay because it really happened that way, it's history, and we need to see it, but if we were JUST making this up for fun we would be called more than sick little pornographers. We are peeking into other people's torment and death like a peep show nightmare. Which is what real horror is all about, I guess.

So, on that happy note, if you are interested in reading about what it was like in the death camps and how people manage to live their lives under the most appallingly unimaginable conditions, this should be right up your alley....

Famous testimony by a Polish poet on his experiences in Auschwitz concentration camp, revealing a quite cynical view on survivors (survivors are seen as near criminals – if you would not pursue and exploit some advantage, you could not have survived the camp). And don’t we love it?

Borowski writes about the ‘Canada’ labour gang that helps unloading newly arrived trains as a kind of elite unit that is eagerly awaiting new booty. There are also some notable lessons or observations mentioned in Borowski’s tales. In one, Borowski observes that hope can be equally powerful for life (survival) as for destruction. ‘Hope (…) makes people go without a murmur to the gas chambers, keeps them from risking a revolt, (…), makes mothers renounce their children, or wives sell their bodies for bread…’. In another instance, Borowski comments on the role of slaves in building the edifices of civilization (pyramids and concentration camps) pointing at the complicit role of victims, but: ‘There can be no beauty if it is paid by human injustice, nor truth that passes over injustice in silence, nor moral virtue that condones it.’ Borowski is also painfully open and blunt about the reasons why some survived the camps: ‘But how did it happen that you survived? … Tell, then, how you bought places in the hospital, easy posts, how you shoved the Moslems into the oven…’.

A week ago I was talking to a friend about the 10-hour documentary Shoah when she gave me a link. I clicked on it. The headline read "Holocaust Study: Two-thirds of millennials don't know what Auschwitz is" (here). Although this study focused on American millennials I still found it alarming. This same headline took me back years ago, in school, where our curriculum did not include much discussion about WWII and the Holocaust was barely even mentioned. If I didn’t initiate seeking books, films, and documentaries I wouldn't know the bigger picture. It was a gruesome thought. This headline, more so. Has the school curriculum of kids today worsened? How can anyone not know about one of the most horrific atrocities committed on mankind? We should avoid forgetting. What with all the political tension around the world and the worrying rise of neo-fascism; the small scale genocidal horrors the media don’t bat their eyelashes on; forgetting may make history repeat itself.

"We are as insensitive as trees, as stones. And we remain as numb as trees when they are being cut down, or stones when they are being crushed."

Borowski, the author of the haunting This Way For The Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen (originally published in 1946), took his own life in 1951 by inhaling gas from a stove. This book is comprised of twelve short stories inspired by his own experiences in Auschwitz. But this collection does not stop there. It tells and also lingers in its aftermath (The January Offensive, A Visit, and The World of Stone); the struggle to pick-up fragments of a life and learning, trying to live in the after. There is an observable distance in Borowski's prose yet the ache is palpable; it surrounds then grips you. For that, it is a very difficult book to read. There are times when I had to take a break because the images and the ambiance it forms in your head are more vivid than the films about the Holocaust: pile of corpses, the Jews entering the gas chambers to their deaths, people shoveling these corpses, burning them then the smoke rising from the crematorium, et cetera, et cetera; they stay with you. To some extent, I can wrap my head around the "reasons" leading to Borowski's death.

"A dream, you see, is not necessarily visual. It may be an emotional experience in which there is depth and where one feels the weight of an object and the warmth of a body..."

But this book is more than that. It is also a piece of history as it is a memory. With the memories of before clinging in the spaces between its sentences, its hope is cautious and wary of its dangers (** "Despite the madness of war, we lived for a world that would be different. For a better world to come when all this is over. And perhaps even our being here is a step towards that world. Do you really think, that the rights of man will be restored again, we could stand the concentration camp even for one day? It is that very hope that makes people go without a murmur to the gas chambers, keeps them from risking a revolt, paralyses them into numb inactivity. It is hope that breaks down family ties, makes mothers renounce their children, or wives sell their bodies for bread, or husbands kill. It is hope that compels man to hold on to one more day of life, because that day may be the day of liberation. Ah, and not even the hope for a different, better world, but simply for life, a life of peace and rest. Never before in the history of mankind has hope been stronger than man, but never also has it done so much harm as it has in this war, in this concentration camp. We were never taught how to give up hope, and this is why today we perish in gas chambers." p122) yet giving with its tenderness through rare glimpses (** "I think about these things and smile condescendingly when people speak to me of morality, of law, of tradition, of obligation...Or when they discard all tenderness and sentiment and, shaking their fists, proclaim this the age of toughness. I smile and I think that one human being must always be discovering another — through love. And that this is the most important thing on earth, and the most lasting." p143).

These are carefully-crafted, painful stories about the reality of the concentration camps, of oppression and utmost cruelty mankind itself is capable of. Some of them brought tears to my eyes; its indubitable significance and moving remembrance hammered my heart and soul into thin strips of despair whilst my mind reels at the circumstances of the present. Highly recommended to everyone. A place to start with never forgetting.

This book, like Night, was a book that took me a very long time to read. I could not get through more than 5 pages at a time because of the nature of the stories. This book is beautifully written, and the stories are horrific and disturbing. However, I also think this book changed my life, you can not read it without thinking differently about the world.
It is not a book for anyone who doesn't do really graphic scenes well.

Birkenau and Auschwitz and after...
By sally tarbox on 7 Nov. 2013
Format: Paperback
Other reviewers have said it all; but this is an immensely shocking and powerful work.
In the stories, Borowski focusses on the vast numbers of prisoners being shipped into the killing factory of Birkenau for a speedy despatch. The true horror comes from the way all these individuals are treated as a commodity, carriages unsealed, the 'transport' despoiled of their luggage by guards and other prisoners walked off to their fate.
"What's new with you?
"Not much. Just gassed up a Czech transport."

"How many have gone by so far? It's been almost two months since mid-May. Counting twenty thousand per day...around one million!"

Horrific images remain with the reader: the women in the experimental block "(they push out their heads between the bars, just like the rabbits my father used to keep; do you remember? grey ones with one floppy ear.)
But the dreadful world he has experienced remains with the author after Liberation; in the final story, 'The World of Stone', thoughts of the past erupt into his everyday world. Walking among a crowd, he imagines "a gust of the cosmic gale has blown the crowd into the air, all the way up to the treetops, sucked the human bodies into a huge whirlpool...mingled the children's rosy cheeks with the hairy chests of the men, entwined the clenched fists with strips of women's dresses, thrown snow-white thighs on the top, like foam, with hats and fragments of heads tangled in hair-like seaweed peeping from below."
Back in the story "The People who walked on", he tells of a female inmate trying to hide her child from the SS and how it dawned on him that "I too would like to have a child with rose-coloured cheeks and light blond hair." Perhaps the saddest fact is that after coming through such horrific experiences, Borowski took his life just three days after his daughter was born.

This collection of holocaust stories from a survivor are remarkable and show the terrible conditions these Jewish prisoners were forced to endure. In this book, a common theme is the sending of prisoners into the gas chambers. This book would not be good for Elementary or Middle school student, but may be appropriate for a high school student. This book is a great example of a historical fiction because it gives us an inside perspective and what it was like to live inside the camps. This book is read like a non-fiction but is actually historical fiction because some of the dialogue is made up.
Use: Teach about WWII; Teach about Holocaust.
Media: N/A

How to review such a hard-hitting but horrific book? I cannot say I 'enjoyed' this in any sense of the word, but I am very glad that I have read it. This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen is a collection of short recollections/ stories about time in Auschwitz. They deal not with the horrors that were inflicted there, but with how these same horrors became part of the everyday and mundane, how the prisoners began to inflict the same horrors on their fellow prisoners, how instead of compassion, hatred and annoyance were fostered. The S.S. officers are always there on the periphery, but the real culprits are the other prisoners - those who have been promoted to slightly senior rankings among the thousands. And how all the prisoners are really aspiring to become those same violent, unpitying seniors because man will do anything to save his own life. And once he has saved his own life, he will start doing unspeakable things in order to cling on to it. There were times when I felt sickened by this, but I also understood it and felt I got a private insight into man's weaknesses and the lengths to which he can be pushed. Incredibly well-written this is a disturbing, yet brilliant book worthy of its place on the 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die list.

This book is simply amazing. As Monty Python might say, "...and now for something completely different..."

I've read much literature written out of the Nazi concentration camps. It's all dreadful. Most famously Eli Wiesel's account in 'Night'. One aches when they read it.

This is just as horrible... but extraordinarily different. For one, this is written by a Pole, an 'Aryan', in Auschwitz. Because of this fact he was granted more 'rights' than the Jews. This is not an account that I have read before. What's so dreadful about Borowski's account is the ORDINARINESS of which he describes the day by day life in the camp in.

It seems as if there is a "Yes, yes. We just saw 20k people who are on their way to the gas chamber to be slaughtered --- but what can I trade you for that onion?"

Fabulous. Read it.

This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen by Tadeusz Borowski
Translated by Barbara Vedder
selected and translated by Barbara Vedder
Published 1959
rating: ★★★★
Pages: 180.

These are short stories inspired by the author's experience in a concentration camp. Mr Borowski is Polish. He is not Jewish. He was in Auschwitz and Dachau for the final few years from 1943 to 1945. He worked there and had it better (a relative term) than the Jewish people who came to Auschwitz. He committed suicide in 1951. Borowski actually ended up arrested because of his girlfriend and that is why he ended up in a concentration camp. He was not a member of a diversive group. He had only gone to the place where he was arrested to check on his girlfriend.
Here are some elements in these short stories:
pg 115 For a day may come when it will be up to us to give an account of the fraud and mockery to the living--to speak up for the dead.
you are not likely to trip if you stand on the shoulders of men who have influence
pg 121 hope (good and bad) the harm of hope.

Reading these stories opens up your eyes to the horror of captivity and slavery. This experience would be psychologically damaging. The fact that the author committed suicide is not a surprise after reading these short descriptive stories of the author's experience.

This is a short story collection by the late Polish Holocaust survivor Tadeusz Borowski. Borowski had been a student of literature in the underground university of Warsaw. This was sufficient reason for him to be detained at Auschwitz and Dachau as a political prisoner. Because of his non-Jewish background, however, his views toward both his captors and his fellow prisoners are somewhat different than those normally reported by concentration camp survivors. For this reason I had a tough time reading it. I think because there seemed to be no hope or some kind of compassion between prisoners like in The Seventh Well by Fred Wander. I understand that they are two different books by two different people with different religious backgrounds imprisoned for different reasons but the darkness and the unsettling nature of the human beast disturbed me in This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen.

Clearly Borowski's feelings toward his Holocaust experience are very conflicted, as evidenced in the wide range of emotions exhibited in his story. He is unquestionably sickened by his situation, he feels there is no point to anything, literally no point at all, and this lack of meaning in his life becomes unendurable; it is scarcely surprising that six years after the end of the war, Tadeusz Borowski committed suicide by gas.

Yet saddest of all is Tadek's suggestion that his point of view was not an uncommon one among the non-Jewish survivors of the concentration camps. Tadek's reactions to the Jews range from indifference to intolerance to hostility. Under the extreme pressure of existence in the concentration camp, these feelings harden into a kind of numbness, because this is the only way he can get from one day to the next.
As his friend Henri says
It exhausts you, you rebel -- and the easiest way to relieve your hate is to turn against someone weaker. Why, I'd even call it healthy.

This slim collection of stories about the Auschwitz camps is remarkable for the narrator’s complete emotional detachment from the horrors it describes: “Between two throw-ins in a soccer game, right behind my back, three thousand people had been put to death.” Where Spiegelman focuses on how the camps changed survivors, Borowski details the everyday mechanisms, and dehumanizations, that allowed the ‘lucky’ ones to avoid death, forcing us, with the title story’s narrator, to ask, “Are we good people?”—and answers, resoundingly, “no.”

The most affecting collection of short stories about the Holocaust that I have ever read.

Review to come

I read this collection on the plane from Seattle to Lihue; what a difficult and eloquent read it was! Several "stories," indistinguishable from truth, capture the day-to-day horror of WWII concentration camps and the way in which these horrors became "ordinary." Borowski, a Hungarian "Aryan" who survived Auschwitz and Berkinau, died by suicide a few years after the end of the war. It would be oversimplifying, I believe, to ascribe his tragic end to the atrocities he witnessed and experienced in the camps, but his witness to the terrible sacrifice and unspeakable determination to survive must tell us something about his decision to end his life. I just don't know exactly what they tell us. Borowski exposed a side of human desperation and determination that is rarely acknowledged in survivor stories. Mothers decrying their children, father denying their families...... humans clinging to the thinest threads of possible survival. These stories are brutal and heartbreaking. And they illustrate a blend of human strength and weakness that most of us can not fathom.

I've visited Auschwitz and the memory of my tourism is poignant. But these stories are an unflinching and deeply honest testament to the true experience of the concentration camps. They provide witness to which we all owe just a moment of our attention.½

Not for the faint of heart, this one.
There are three facets of Borowski’s work that I believe make his writing unique in Holocaust literature: The sardonic yet emotionless narrative, the almost visceral sense of chaotic desperation and terror experienced by the arriving transports and finally, the numbness that develops when witnessing industrialized, mechanized and assembly-line mass murder.
The title as well as the tone of many of the stories bear a cutting, almost mocking quality which might be seen by some as offensive. In my opinion though, the authenticity of a survivor’s testimony can give integrity to this tone and it certainly does in this case. Borowski was a Polish non-Jew imprisoned as a laborer in Auschwitz. He worked in a kommando – a work gang. Though his life was always in danger, he was not slated for the crematoria. He was often put in charge of other laborers and the fictional stories (which are thinly veiled memoirs) portray the ways in which he bartered for food, clothing and survival in general. In fact the power struggles among the ranks of inmates is gruesomely depicted in these stories. The stories underscore how, where survival is the sole goal, one’s humanity is stripped away in order to endure. The fact that Borowski presents these stories in a very subdued matter of fact manner while underscoring the complete absurdity of this existence gives them even greater impact.

"We said that there is no crime that a man will not commit in order to save himself. And, having saved himself, he will commit crimes for increasingly trivial reasons: he will commit them first out of duty, then from habit and finally – for pleasure."

The running theme of Borowski’s stories is the industrialized and nearly mechanical nature of the death camps. Borowski describes the ceaseless pattern of the march to the crematoria from the unloading of transports upon arrival to the color and smell of the smoke. He is the detached observer, dryly recounting the standard operating procedure that enabled the death camps to implement mass murder in an efficient and industrialized manner. It sounds impossible, but Borowski describes the terror and chaos in numb and methodical tones. No other book I’ve read (and I’ve been fairly obsessed with this topic throughout my life so, I’ve read a lot) has ever resounded so profoundly or frighteningly.
I highly recommend this book, but I will say, that it's not for everyone.

To understand these stories, I think it helps to understand the author's background. Tadeusz Borowski was born in the Soviet Ukraine to Polish parents. As a child, his father was interred in one of the harshest Soviet labor camps, above the Arctic Circle, digging the White Sea Canal. When Borowski was eight, his mother was sent to work in Siberia as well. He lived with an aunt until his family was repatriated to Warsaw in the early 1930s. In 1943, Borowski and his fiance were arrested for their participation in underground publications and sent to Auschwitz. Although both survived the camps and later married, Borowski was unable to reconcile his desire to write the truth with the demands of the communist State on authors. At the age of 29, he turned on the gas in his apartment and committed suicide.

This collection of twelve short stories are inspired by the author's experiences in Auschwitz and Dachau. The first two stories were written and published in Poland right after his release. "They produced a shock," writes Jan Kott in his introduction. "The public was expecting martyrologies; the Communist party called for works that were ideological, that divided the world into the righteous and the unrighteous, heroes and traitors, Communists and Fascists. Borowski was accused of amorality, decadence, and nihilism. Yet at the same time it was clear to everyone that Polish literature had gained a dazzling new talent." Borowski eschewed easy answers and wrote about the moral ambiguities that plagued him. He had survived the camps, but at what cost? Three of his stories are written from the perspective of a deputy Kapo, Vorarbeiter Tadeusz. Young, impressionable, and wanting to survive, Vorarbeiter Tadeusz has a minor position over other prisoners that gives him perks of food and clothes which allow him to survive, but at the cost of moral clarity. Small compromises become everyday, violence and lack of compassion become less uncomfortable, and he survives. But some horrors still have the power to shock, which allows Tadeusz to maintain his humanity.

The stories are horrible to read not only because of the situation, but precisely because there are no heroes, and everyone is both a perpetrator and a victim. Borowski learned this first hand in the camps and lived it afterwards in Communist Poland. The moral ambiguity of his position is, perhaps, what caused him to commit suicide. I found this collection extremely depressing, even more so than other Holocaust literature, and challenging in its unflinching look at the dark side of survival.½

This book features a series of essays/writings by a concentration camp survivor. Tadeusz survived the horrors of Auschwitz and Dachau. He describes a world were compassion has been replaced by an overwhelming need to survive, regardless of the consequences. I can only describe his writing style as beautiful yet haunting. He holds nothing back in his quest to tell these horror stories. Overall, highly recommended.

Excellent "stories". Beautifully written and sad with some amazingly poignant passages... It was interesting to ponder the differences in experience between the Jewish and non-Jewish prisoners.

This collection of short stories by an Auschwitz survivor is a glimpse into the horrors of the concentration camp where people do whatever is necessary to survive. Although classified as fiction, it is clearly a chronicle of all that Borowksi participated in and observed. The arrival of the transports that brought thousands of people to a camp where they were then immediately dispatched to the gas chambers is just one of the horrific, unimaginable events that was a routine part of everyday life. The monstrous inhumanity of the Nazis is beyond comprehension to a sane mind.

A collection of short stories set in Auschwitz and the period shortly after the war. Borowski was a Pole (non-Jewish) who was interned in Auschwitz and Dachau, and the stories are plainly fictionalised versions of real events. His style is very direct and unembellished, but he uses it to provide a broader vision and significance to what happened. It is brutal, not just in what was done to the Nazis' victims but what it made them into. The narrator laughs at an old man hurrying up, responding to an SS officer's chiding, after taking a toilet break in a ditch, because all he is hurrying for is the gas chamber; he gets into amiable conversation with a Sonderkommando who claims do have done nothing much recently, just gassed up a Czech transport. There are no heroes in the camp, and he gets across how many of the survivors could only survive by making sure that they were the ones with the good jobs and rations, and frequently by giving another man a shove in the direction of the gas chamber to avoid going themselves. As bleak as it sounds, but a great book. The title story, about the arrival of a transport, and a series of letters from a prisoner to his fiancee in the adjacent women's camp (as Borowski's girlfriend was), are as good as anything I've read.

Bloedstollende verhalen waarvoor de auteur (die op 28-jarige leeftijd zelfmoord pleegde) zich baseert op zijn ervaringen als niet-joodse kampgevangene. Hij werd onder meer ingezet bij het ontruimen van de treinen na aankomst van de transporten waarover hij getuigt in het gruwelverhaal 'Hierheen naar de gaskamer, dames en heren'. Het kampgebeuren wordt beschreven door de ogen van een Häftling (=Borowski) die er zelf het beste van moet maken, zonder dat hij daarom oog verliest voor het onbeschrijfelijke leed dat de slachtoffers aangedaan wordt. Het begrip 'kampcomplex' kun je na deze lectuur maar al te goed begrijpen.

What I think has guaranteed 'This Way for the Gas' its lasting appeal, so to speak, is the way in which Borowski does not dignify his characters, since there was no dignity in the concentration camps to begin with. In a way, each of these short stories is stunning in the most literal sense, with descriptions of brutality and inhumanity that rub shoulders with the mundane and banality of life in a camp; one cannot escape the feeling of otherworldliness and beastliness that is all pervasive.

Easily the most disturbing work of fiction I have ever read, this collection of stories creates a tapestry of evil woven from the most human of all threads, the voice and reflected voices of the victims. It is empowering to hear the groans of humanity rise above the horrors of inhumanity, even while it is crushing to endure the stifling of the all-too-human characters. I could not, in good conscience, recommend this book to anyone, for it is an emotionally wrenching read, and yet I recommend this book to everyone for it captures the truth of our lives. We, as people, can adapt to any situation and retain the poetic beauty of our souls.