This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen by Tadeusz Borowski (*****)
3/50 Amazon

(This is the only book I finished in February. And I took a really long time to make a note of it.) I have had this book since college. While I am sure I read some of it in school, I don’t think I read all of it until recently. It is a collection of short stories about life in a Nazi concentration camp, written by a concentration camp survivor. As with all holocaust literature, it documents atrocities I can scarcely imagine. This particular book does so in an unnervingly mundane way. Borowski writes about small details, like writing a letter to a lover in the next camp over, or listening to the camp orchestra (made up of prisoners who worked in the kitchen), or playing soccer while thousands of others walk to their deaths in the crematoria. Becoming “totally familiar with the inexplicable and the abnormal,” as he describes it, is eerie and unsettling.

Borowski’s words:

But this is how it is done: first just one ordinary barn, brightly whitewashed–and here they proceed to asphyxiate people. Later, four large buildings, accommodating twenty thousand at a time without any trouble. No hocus-pocus, no poison, no hypnosis. Only several men directing traffic to keep operations running smoothly, and the thousands flow along like water from an open tap. All this happens just beyond the anaemic trees of the dusty little wood. 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. What is this mystery? This strange power of one man over another? This insane passivity that cannot be overcome? Our only strength is our great number–the gas chambers cannot accomodate all of us.