This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen 
by 

Tadeusz Borowski, 

 

Barbara Vedder (Editor/Translator), 

 

Jan Kott (Introduction), 

 

Michael Kandel (Translator)

 

BlackOxford's review 

Sep 08, 2019  ·  edit

it was amazing

bookshelves: slavic, holocaust-modern-diaspora, historical-fiction 

The Dead Are Always Right

Tadeusz Borowski survived the horrors of Auschwitz, some of which are described in these stories, only to commit suicide. Despair is not an adequate explanation for such an act by a man who had experienced what he had. Neither, for me, is any other purely emotional reason. 

So I have spent the better part of the last three days thinking and writing in an attempt to understand the rationale, the redeeming purpose perhaps, of his suicide. Surely, I surmised, his death, as that of Primo Levi among so many others, is something other than tragedy doubled. As it turned out, my thoughts were excruciatingly trivial; the 5000 or so words that followed were patent nonsense. 

To say that the Holocaust, and especially the deaths of people like Borowski and Levi, are things beyond reason is simultaneously obvious and revelatory. Obvious because the sheer number of such victims provides overwhelming evidence of the depravity of human beings; revelatory, because their deaths explain that when we understand this, we become unbearable even to ourselves. We are an inherently hateful species.