This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen

Two solid rules for reading fiction – (1) Fiction is fiction. Don't confuse a fictional character with the author; (2) Judge the art, not the artist.

This book challenges these rules. This is a collection of short stories taking place in concentration camps. What makes them somewhat unique is that the author himself spent time in Auschwitz and Dachau. The stories, though fiction, feel at times like a barely dramatized version of the truth. Borowski examines the lives of various prisoners in concentration camps. Clearly all prisoners were victims, but he goes beyond that and examines the relationships between various prisoners. There is little room for compassion. There is only life or death.

The stories themselves are good, solid stories. Some are better than others, but he demonstrated significant talent, and it is a shame that he died before producing more work (in a cruel twist, he survived Auschwitz and the gas chambers only to commit suicide using gas in 1951).

It was a bizarre journey to read this directly after finishing “Man's Search for Meaning” by Viktor Frankl. To move from a book that was ultimately so positive and hopeful into one that is so broken and pained is a sobering experience. The more one reads about the Holocaust, the more it refuses classification, organization, or any attempt to simplify or understand it. Viktor Frankl found that a person can survive anything so long as they have a meaning in their life, and spent the rest of this life spreading that message. Borowski survived, married his fiancé who had also survived, and then committed suicide three days after she gave birth to their daughter. I will not claim to know everything he was thinking and feeling at the time; I can't even begin to imagine.

This book does not revel in the horrors it presents, and that is what makes it harder to read than most books. If it dangled its horrors in your face, then it would feel exploitative, and that is something that is more familiar to people. You would have people outraged on one side, and enjoying it on the other. But these stories do not do that. By opening it, you have walked through a door into a place where you may see all the things that humans are capable of doing to each other. Most of the time, we think we have seen this before, but we're never aware of how other artists cover up the worst things, or hide them behind implication, have them happen offscreen in the movie. Borowski chooses to hide nothing. You have come into this place, you wanted to learn about this, so Borowski does the cruelest and wisest thing, and allows you to see it.

I am haunted by this book. I am also motivated to do all I can to make the world a better place, in whatever way I am able. I rarely encounter a book that I believe “everyone should read,” but this may be an exception.