This way for the gas, ladies and gentlemen Book

This is an account of Auschwitz, in the form of a series of first person short stories, from someone who is still begrimed and drenched in its depravity. Because he wrote it so soon after his experience Borowski has managed to put little if any distance between himself and what he’s describing. The tone of the book, perfectly captured in its title, is thus deeply disturbing. In fact it reads like a suicide note.

Concentration camp stories tend to focus on the fortitude and humanity of inmates. Rarely do we see the darker side of what people did to survive. Rarely do we see the hierarchies among the inmates. Rarely do we see how successfully in their evil genius the Nazis stripped individuals of all moral sense. There’s the sense here that the inmates are like heroin addicts, survival their daily fix. They have their close inner circle of useful contacts and friends but are numbed to indifference about the plight of everyone outside that circle. They will even hurt these others if there’s something to gain, even if that something is merely a moment’s pleasure, the pleasure of accruing power. Power, as he states, is earned by the exploitation of others. People will always seek power and perhaps never more so than when they are made to feel powerless.

Perhaps the most memorable image in the book is of a game of football the narrator is playing while a transport arrives at the ramp. He registers the arrival of a train full of Hungarian Jews; the next moment his attention strays from the game the entire convoy has disappeared. “Between two throw-ins in a soccer game, right behind my back, three thousand people had been put to death.” He narrates this as though it is of little more emotional significance than an unloading process in a factory.

This book is as disturbed as it is disturbing. Borowski, you feel, deliberately eschewed all temptation to make his material palatable, subject in any way to reason. He wanted to speak from the ground, not from the meditated hindsight of a library or study. Probably what it does better than any other Holocaust book I’ve read is show the extreme difficulty of processing what happened in the camps or even finding the appropriate moral tone with which to talk about it.