This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen (Penguin Twentieth Century Classics)
Product Details | Similar Products | Customer Reviews | Author: Tadeusz Borowski List Price: £8.99 Our Price: £5.83 You Save: £3.16 (35%) Availability: Usually dispatched within 24 hours  |
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 | Product Details: Paperback 192 pages Release Date: 26 November 1992 Publisher: Penguin Classics ISBN: 0140186247 Rating:   Sales Rank: 34097 | | Look for similar books by subject:
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| | Customer Reviews: A master-writer of the short story form (29 September 2009)Incredible that someone can survive such horrors and then go on to write such compelling short stories about them. A master-writer of the genre, who himself survived two death camps only to tragically commit suicide later, by gassing himself. A devastating review of how human beings survive in an unbearable environment. (25 May 2009)The experience of Auschwitz told in terms of everyday normality sitting side by side with systemactic slaughter. This is only 180 pages long, but is so remarkable and shocking that it took me nearly a week to read it. Borowski was an Aryan prisoner at both Birkenau and it's neighbour, Auschwitz. A few weeks before his arrival Nazi policy changed so that Aryans were not normally sent to the gas chamber. In this book he recounts his experiences in the camps - and after his liberation - in the form of a series of short stories effectively told in the first person. This is a world where, in Borowski's words, "..the ideals of freedom, justice and human dignity had slid off man like a rotten rag....There is no crime that man will not commit in order to save himself. And having saved himself he will commit crimes for increasingly trivial reasons; he will commit them firstly out of duty, then from habit, and finally - for pleasure." Borowski and the other Aryan prisoners receive red cross parcels, letters and presents from home, have a soccer pitch, concert hall, hospital and even a brothel. At the same time they are assigned work that includes dispatching the trainloads of Jews to the gas chamber and the beating or killing to order of fellow prisoners. He describes a system established by the Nazis where the prisoners are complicit in the running of the extermination programme but spend their time working the system to get better jobs and more food, or trading and bartering items plundered from the gas chamber victims. It is is fantastically well written account, using simple images and language to describe the camp set up, the relationships between the inmates and how they cope with and react to the awfulness of the system they are in. A kind of normal human life exists side by side with the holocaust. In one story he describes a train arriving with 3,000 Jews aboard during a football match. Everyone on board is sent directly to the gas chamber in the interval between two throw-ins. He is a tremendously sympathetic writer and is able to show the point of view of even the vilest inmates and set their actions in context. He doesn't ask for forgiveness of anyone, including himself, but simply sets out the circumstances he found himself in. It's a completely different take on the camps than a straight historical narrative and all the more terrifying as a result and it has given me actual nightmares. In my view this is a masterpiece. Moving (21 June 2008)I found this book by chance. I think it is the most moving book I have read on this subject. Tadeusz comes across as a very strong person in the face of such horror. For someone so young he seemed to cope with it all in a heroic way. Sadly he fell apart in the end and could make no sense of it all even though he was free. He should be remembered more than he seems to be. I had not heard of him prior to reading this and I should have. He was in need of help just as much on his release as he had been in the camps. Maybe he needed more help outside as he was alone to ponder on the shock of all he had seen and realised that nothing had really changed in the outside world as a consequence of it. Shocking (26 March 2008)A truly fantastic book through the eyes of an unfortunate man who witnessed the horrors of the holocaust. This book opens your eyes to what really happened and its autobiographic touch presents the authenticity of what is being said. A fantastic read, anyone even slightly interested in what happened behind the doors of Auschwitz and other camps should buy this book. An unforgettable historical account. Highly recommended TALES FROM THE DARK SIDE... (03 March 2006)In the annals of holocaust literature, this is one of the more unflinching collection of death camp stories, as it depicts the stark reality of the desperate situation of those ensconced in concentration camps, where the final solution was frantically put into play. The stories are of the unimaginable and the nearly unendurable, replete with the inherent pathos of the situation of the truly desperate. It is shows the desensitization that takes place in order for one to survive the horrors of a death camp. It is an unapologetic dissertation of what camp life was truly like for those for whom surviving was the bottom line. It also shows how the Jewish people were clearly singled out for mass extermination. The author himself survived two death camps, Auschwitz and Dachau, where he had been imprisoned from 1943 to 1945, as a young man in his early twenties. Born in the Ukraine in 1922 to Polish parents who spent time in Siberian labor camps, the author was no stranger to hardship. Yet, he was little prepared for man's inhumanity to man. His time in the death camps was to form an indelible impression on him, resulting in this collection of stories, which chronicle man's inhumanity to man. It shows how camp culture made all those within its sphere participants in its reign of terror and in the final solution. In the end, having survived the unimaginable, the author committed suicide in 1951, choosing to gas himself to death. The irony inherent in his choice of death is not lost upon the discerning reader. | |
