Mike Pistic
Professor G. Smith
English 111
10 May 2016
Welcome to Auschwitz: The Dark Side of Self-Preservation
The story “This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen” by Tadeusz Borowski recreates the brutal image of a Nazi concentration camp through astonishing details and the kind of narrative that spreads chills in every scene. With the narrative’s direct approach, the author wants us to take the facts “as is”. Even when the story becomes a fiction, he doesn’t feel the need of editing the gruesome events that led to one of the biggest tragedies in humankind’s history. But was the narrator just a simple senseless and “privileged” prisoner, with immoral ambitions towards survival, or he did care about the Jews where the “naked” truth becomes the only obstacle between the train ramp and the gas chamber? Waiting for the trains to arrive, and witnessing the prisoners’ manifestation, we can certainly point out the psychological damage that the camp life inflicted upon him, and the occasional outburst of emotions in the process of self-preservation.
One of the most tragic and feared element in WWII was the Nazi concentration camp. Officially presented as a labor camp, it came to be known as the final destination for the Jews, one that ended up with death or in this case with mass killing. The German ideology of Aryan race superiority was in high contrast with the Bible and the Jews. Because the Jews are called the chosen people, and being viewed as society’s “parasites” by the Nazis, it resulted in rounding them up from conquered European countries and sending to extermination. Borowski himself was sent in one of the camps, not because he was Jewish, but because of his activism against them. Although the camp is immense, it presents little obstacle for the Germany’s agenda, with its set of rules. One of them is “Ordnung muss sein” and as Mark Shechner explains: