In This Way For The Gas, Ladies And Gentlemen, By Tadeusz Borowski

Tadeusz Borowski was born in Zhitomir, Russia in 1992. He was born and raised from a Polish family. He was exiled when he was four years old to a cruel labor camp in the Arctic Circle. Four years after this happened, he found out that his mother was sent off to Siberia, so he was raised by his aunt after this happened. However, his family was later reunited in Warsaw. Tadeusz Borowski continued to further his education in private during World War II. He worked with several underground presses, and he later published his first poem while he had the time to. Borowski was later trapped by the Gestapo when looking for his fiancée, and they both were shipped off to Auschwitz in 1943 of April, and because neither one of them were Jewish, they were both candidates for the gas chamber. Borowski explains his experiences from the gas chambers in his story, This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen. Taduesz Borowski later sided to Communist journalism, even though it is not clear why he decided to side with the state and not his hidden talents. In his story, Borowski explains the difficult times he went through with the gas chambers, and he explains in great detail how he never has fully recovered from being trapped in Auschwitz.

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“Borrowski’s confessional mode conceals as much as it reveals, drawing the reader into a complicity with
events along with the narrator, who finds his detachment foiled by the episodes he describes. Staying alive in Auschwitz sabotaged the moral codes that allowed the victims and, through a kind of imaginative osmosis, the readers of these tales to distance themselves from its evil.” (Borrowski 342)

“We line up. Someone has marked down our numbers, someone up ahead yells, ‘March, march,’ and now we are running towards the gate, accompanied by the shouts of a multilingual throng that is already being pushed back to the barracks.” (Borrowski 345) He explains a lot with great detail what their every day routine was like, and all the troubles they went through every day. Just like Spiegelman’s book, Maus, he explains the fear they all felt and harsh punishments they were put through as well. The things they all faced in Auschwitz were cruel and unusual punishments. They were forced to line up like animals and take their punishment one at a time. Not only that, but they were also told to “lie against the rails in the narrow streaks of shade, breathe unevenly, occasionally exchange a few words in our various tongues, and gaze listlessly at the majestic men in green uniforms, at the green trees, and at the church steeple of a distant village.” (Borrowski 347) “All of us walk around naked.” (Borrowski 343) In that little sentence, it goes to show you that not everyone lived the easy life, and that they all went through the rough times while being tortured in Auschwitz. The heat rose each and every day, and the hours were endless, but that never stopped them from being tortured. According to dictionary.com, complicit simply means, “choosing to be involved in an illegal or questionable act, especially with others; having complicity.” (Dictionary.com) However, in Taduesz Borrowski’s story, complicit might mean the same thing as dictionary.com, but in my opinion, it simply means saving yourself. I think that Taduesz saved himself by being involved in Auschwitz.
“I look at her without saying a word. Here, standing before me, is a girl, a girl with enchanting blonde hair, with beautiful breasts, wearing a little cotton blouse, a girl with a
Yount 3 wise, mature look in her eyes, Here she stands, gazing straight into my face, waiting. And over there is the gas chamber: communal death, disguising and ugly. And over in the other direction is the concentration camp: the shaved heads, the heavy Soviet trousers in sweltering heat, the sickening stale odour of dirty, damp female bodies, the animal hunger, the inhuman labour, and later the same gas chamber, only an even more hideous, more terrible death....” (Borrowski 352) After reading this quote, I honestly believe that Borrowski was just protecting himself and his life when he got involved in Auschwitz. To me, he came off too innocent and too good of a person to get involved in crimes like that. The word survive, simply means, to remain alive after the death of someone.
(Dictionary.com) In Borrowski’s story, I truly believe that he is a survivor just like Vladek Spiegelman did. He did what he had to do in order to come out a survivor, this meaning that he also had to be involved with horrible cases of murder, or watching someone be murdered. “I carry out dead infants; I unload luggage. I touch corpses, but I cannot overcome the mounting, uncontrollable terror.” (Borrowski 353) He also explains the struggles of how when he became involved in Auschwitz, he was constantly being whipped around and tortured
verbally. Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel, Maus, was written about a Jewish survivor, and his son. His son was a cartoonist who tried to come to terms with his father by writing his father 's horrible, and scary story about the history of Hitler. He wrote it in graphic form, because he found it would be more helpful and interesting. Not only that, but it would help explain the story a lot better, and draw the attention better for the audience. In the story of Maus, Art Spiegelman’s father, Vladek Spiegelman, was a survivor. His story is a little bit different than Borrowski’s story, only because Spiegelman explains his fears and what his nightmares consisted of. “ I was frightened to go outside for a few days...I didn 't want to pass where they were hanging.” (Spiegelman 84) He was never involved with murders or an act of crime like Borrowski was, he was an everyday person
Yount 4 who tried to survive as much as he could. However, Art writes that his father was in a lot of fear while trying to just live and pass through the entire horror story of his life. At one point, Vladek explains how he watched his parents “disappear from his eyes” “It was the last time ever we saw them, but that we couldn 't know.” (Spiegelman 108) As a young adult and having to watch the crimes, and the hardships they faced would be horrible. I couldn 't imagine seeing the things that he saw every day. Unlike Borrowski, Spiegelman never went through the gas chambers and refused to go through them. Not only did he refuse to go through the chambers, he also refused to put his children through the horrible gas chambers. In both Spiegelman’s and Borrowski’s stories, each one of the main character were survivors in their own different ways. Whether it was sacrificing the worst to be a survivor like Borrowski did, or if it was explaining his hardships and difficulties to his son like Spiegelman did, they both went through the same cruel and unusual punishments.

Yount 5 Works Cited

Art from the Ashes: A Holocaust Anthology. Lawrence L. Langer, ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995