Not just another game (This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen - Tadeusz Borowski)

Member Name: freediveheaven

Product:	This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen - Tadeusz Borowski
Date:	22/05/06 (361 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Horrific account that will move the reader

Disadvantages: Does not answer all your questions.

“Between two throw-ins in a soccer game, right behind my back, three thousand people had been put to death”

There are many haunting words in Tadeusz Borowski set of short stories which provide a personal account of his life in a Nazi (I cannot call them German as such places do not represent the German people I have ever met) concentration camp however the quotation at the top of this review for me was one of the most horrific purely because the day before I had sat in the Stade de France watching my team lose the Champions League Final and to be honest I felt pretty down so everything was bought into sharp context as I sat in the beautiful Jardin Du Luxembourg and read this particular passage.

The Author

To understand fully the impact of this particular book and its relevance as an account of life in a concentration camp it is important to know a little bit about the author.

Tadeusz Borowski was born in the Ukraine in 1922; his Polish father was taken to a Soviet Labour Camp as was his mother before the family was reunited in Poland. Borowski was captured during the war by the Gestapo while visiting a flat in search of his missing girlfriend who had been captured a day or so earlier at the same apartment and he spent the remainder of the war in both Auschwitz and Dachau.

After surviving life in the camps there is a certain irony that a few years after the end of the war in 1951 he would take his life by turning on the gas in his own kitchen after all those years spent avoiding the Nazi gas chambers.

The Stories

A more complete account of Borowski life I provided in the introduction written by Jan Kott a fellow countryman. Normally I do not always read the introduction but with this particular book it certainly add value and whilst it does not specifically give the reasons why Borowski ended up taking his own life once you have read the book and understand the horrendous things that Borowski saw in his short life then it is not a great leap of understanding to see why he might especially given the fact that he found himself living back under Soviet control again.

Each of the stories in this book are quite short and are written in the first person with many of them actually letters that he wrote to his girlfriend.

The opening story from which the book gets its title is probably the most disturbing of all the stories as it charts the day that Borowski worked on one of the teams charged with unloading the transports of people destined for the gas chambers. Throughout the whole experience there is a sense of polite acceptance of those people who right up to the end believe that they are going for a communal bath after their journey whilst the whole time their belongings right down to the gold in their teeth is being recorded ready for shipment back to Berlin. Even the prisoners working with Borowski believe themselves to be fortunate as they are able to keep the food that the new prisoners bring with them and it is these transports that keep the rest of the camp alive with the food and clothes they are able to “organize” for themselves.

Whilst the scale of the killings is upsetting in itself the real horror in this book is the way that every day life is portrayed. Borowski has a wonderfully descriptive style of writing that brings to life his surroundings and the desperation of the inmates to cling onto life at whatever the cost. What is just as chilling is the stark fact that without the complicit compliance of the inmates the camps could not have operated on the scale that they did. It was the inmates that fulfilled many of the jobs in the camp whilst at the same time there was an organized orchestra which would arrange recitals in the evenings alongside poetry readings and plays. There was even a football pitch set up by the inmates past which new arrivals filed past on the way to the gas chamber.

Towards the end of the book the last couple of stories deal with the arrival of the Americans and the fact that rather than being automatically released the inmates are forced to stay in the camp while decisions are made about what to do with them. I found this sections quite interesting as it was a side to the whole war that I had not come across before, we tend to learn about the events in the camps in terms of numbers of human loss and not in what happened to those who survived who had no recognizable country to return to.

Summary

This is an excellent account of life in a concentration camp, it is harrowing at times however despite the bleak subject matter there are some wonderful descriptive passages and a certain dark gallows humour in places. Borowski was obviously a talented writer and although this is a translation the quality shines through and indeed in places there is an explanation of what a word means when no alternative English word exists.

I found this book to be very informative and an excellent read and certainly helped focus my mind on the fact that the events of Wednesday night were just a game.

The book will not answer all of your questions, indeed the reason for Borowski taking his own life is one that he took to the grave but certainly it has helped to ignite an interest in me to read more on the subject.

Published by Penguin Classics the rrp is £7.99 although you can buy it new from Amazon for £7.19 or from £3.98 in the new and used section.

The ISBN is 0-14-018624-7.

Thanks for reading and rating my review. Also thanks to the first reviewer of this book Maghda without whom I would never have discovered it.

Summary: Concentration Camp stories.