Book review: “This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen” by Tadeusz Borowski

In eight of the stories collected in This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, Tadeusz Borowski describes life in the Nazi concentration camps of World War II.

Four others deal with the reverberations of that existence in the postwar lives of the survivors.

Borowski, born in what is now Ukraine, was arrested by the Gestapo in Warsaw in 1943 because of the underground activities of his girlfriend. He was 21. He survived more than two years in Auschwitz, Dachau and other camps and wrote the stories in this collection over the next six years.

On July 1, 1951, he took his life by opening a gas valve. It was his third attempt. He wasn’t yet thirty.

 

Alternative to a scream

As the title of this collection suggests, there is a thread of dark humor through This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen — although to call it humor is to slander all other wit. This is the sort of humor that sees madness for what it is, injustice, cruelty, inhumanity, savagery for what it is. It is the sort of humor that is the only alternative to a scream.

For instance, here are the first two sentences of the first story which has the same title as the collection:

All of us walk around naked. The delousing is finally over, and our striped suits are back from the tanks of Cyclone B solution, an effective killer of lice in clothing and of men in gas chambers.

Or, a few pages later, describing a railway station:

This is where they load freight for Birkenau: supplies for the construction of the camps, and people for the gas chambers. Trucks drive around, load up lumber, cement, people — a regular daily routine.

Or, at the end of the story, the narrator is emotionally stunned while helping the special camp cadre of prisoners who, day in and day out, herd the newly arrived Jews and other captives to the gas chambers. He has just watched, after horror upon horror, an S.S. man kick a little girl to the ground because she has been whining loudly and shoot her twice, watching until her body stiffens in death.

The narrator can no longer control his nausea. He vomits and finds a spot away from all the activity, a stack of rails.

I lie against the cool, kind metal and dream about returning to the camp, about my bunk, on which there is no mattress, about sleep among comrades who are not going to the gas tonight. Suddenly I see the camp as a haven of peace. It is true, others may be dying, but one is somehow still alive, one has enough food, enough strength to work.

Cyclone B, equally good as a killer of lice and people.  The same trucks that move lumber and cement take people to the gas chambers. The concentration camp, set apart from the gas chambers and the killing, is “a haven of peace.”

Maybe a scream would be better.

Pleasure

The incongruities of humor provide psychic distance for the writer and the reader, and this thread of humor is joined by a thread of reportage: a detailing of the facts of the matter. For instance, in the story “A Day at Marmenz”:

Exhausted prisoners from all over the field drag themselves slowly towards the caldrons, trying to stretch out the blessed moment just before dinner, to relish the hunger which they will shortly satisfy.

In another story, “Auschwitz, Our Home (A Letter),” the narrator sees some civilians who look with horror at the camp prisoners:

Remember the horror you felt when they arrested you?

Today, having become totally familiar with the inexplicable and the abnormal; having learned to live on intimate terms with the crematoria, the itch and the tuberculosis; having understood the true meaning of wind, rain and sun, of bread and turnip soup, of work to survive, of slavery and power; having, so to say, daily broken bread with the beast — I look at these civilians with a certain indulgence, the way a scientist regards a layman, or the initiated an outsider.

Pleasure in the camp — for those not sent to the gas chambers, or the “cremo” as it’s called — includes relishing hunger.

Pleasure is also feeling superior to such civilians, feeling like an insider — in a concentration camp.

 

“Nobody cries out”

Such threads, however, are minor compared to the deep despair that saturates these stories.

Perhaps the most profound insight that comes through these stories is how the Nazis built their inhuman processes around the ability of prisoners — those not led to the gas chambers immediately — to adapt themselves in a very human way to such horrible, degrading and threatening conditions. At least, they could until they could no longer.

All of the tens of thousands in the camp know what is going on, explains Borowski’s narrator in “Auschwitz, Our Home (A Letter),” and everything moves like smoothly oiled machinery.

Ordinary trucks bring people, return, then bring some more. No hocus-pocus, no poison, no hypnosis.

Why is it that nobody cries out, nobody spits in their faces, nobody jumps at their throats? We doff our caps to the S.S. men returning from the little wood; if our name is called we obediently go with them to die, and — we do nothing. We starve, we are drenched by rain, we are torn from our families.

 

Hope

The narrator ponders this “insane passivity” and makes clear to the reader that the Nazis have a secret weapon.  It’s called hope.

He tells the reader that the only way the prisoners could keep on — until they couldn’t keep on any longer — was by hoping for a future world after the war that would be a better world.

Do you really think that, without the hope that such a world is possible, that the rights of man will be restored again, we could stand the concentration camp even for one day? It is that very hope that makes people go without a murmur to the gas chambers, keeps them from risking revolt, paralyzes them into numb inactivity. It is hope that breaks down family ties, makes mothers renounce their children, or wives sell their bodies for bread, or husbands kill…

We were never taught how to give up hope, and this is why today we perish in gas chambers.

 

Patrick T. Reardon

8.18.25