This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen

The short stories in Tadeusz Borowski’s collection, This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, were selected from two earlier volumes of stories, Farewell to Maria and The World of Stone, both published in Poland in 1948. The collection was translated into English in 1967 and published in the United States. Borowski’s stories are based on his experiences as a concentration camp inmate at Auschwitz-Birkenau during the Holocaust. His fiancée, Maria Rundo, was arrested as part of the Polish liberation movement and Borowski, who was participating in illegal schooling and leftist publishing, was arrested a few days later at age 21. He spent two months in prison and was then transported to Auschwitz, where he would remain until the camp was liberated in 1945. In 1946, Borowski returned to Poland where he was reunited with Maria, whom he married later that year. In 1951, only a few days after his wife gave birth to their daughter, Borowski committed suicide by inhaling the gas from a stove at the age of 28.

Plot Summary

Each story is told from the perspective of a narrator who is ostensibly interchangeable with the author—who is called Tadek, short for Tadeusz, in the second story. However, not every story is autobiographical. In the title story, Tadek receives an opportunity to help unload the freight trains bringing new prisoners to the camp, a coveted job because it allows the hungry inmates to collect food from the luggage. However, Tadek discovers that this is brutal, inhuman work, which his friend, Henri, has become desensitized to doing. In the second story, “A Day at Harmenz,” Tadek oversees a Kommando of workers doing hard labor in the fields. He is well-fed, as he receives food from a woman who lives nearby, but the story shows how hunger causes betrayal among the inmates. The third story, “The People Who Walked On,” begins with the inmates building a soccer field, from which the men can see both the trains and the women’s camp. Tadek discovers the poor conditions of the women and hears thousands of people as they continuously walk from the train to either life in the camp or death in the crematorium.

Tadek writes to his girlfriend, who is imprisoned in the women’s camp, in “Auschwitz, Our Home (A Letter).” He was selected to train to become a doctor in the Auschwitz hospital. Tadek begins the story in an ironically cheerful tone, describing Auschwitz as if it is pleasant, but the story becomes darker as Tadek comments on the way the luxuries at Auschwitz, such as a symphony and a brothel, serve to distract the outside world from the atrocities that occur there. “The Death of Schillinger” is about a brutal S.S. officer who dies when a woman he is attempting to rape steals his gun and shoots him.

In “The Man with the Package,” a Jewish clerk in the hospital becomes ill and is slated to go to the gas chamber. The man tries to take all of his possessions with him in a package, signifying that he is holding out hope until the end. The inmates are starving in “The Supper,” and when a group of Russian soldiers are executed, the prisoners rush to eat whatever they can of their bodies. In “A True Story,” Tadek is hospitalized and sick, afraid that he might die. In the next bed, a Kapo demands that Tadek tell him stories from his life. Tadek tells of a boy whom he met in prison who was reading the Bible to pretend not to be Jewish. The Kapo tells Tadek that the same boy died in Tadek's bed.

“Silence” takes place when the camp is liberated. The inmates capture an S.S. officer, and although an American soldier tells them not to seek their own revenge, they kill the officer themselves. After Tadek leaves the camp, he ends up in West Germany in “The January Offensive.” He and three other survivors invite a Polish poet to stay with them, and they argue whether humans have the capacity for selflessness when faced with their own potential death. In “The Visit,” Tadek remembers the people he met in the camp but cannot think of himself as someone who survived Auschwitz. The last story, “A World of Stone,” is about Tadek’s growing feeling that the world will disappear as he goes through his days, numb to everything and everyone around him. He promises to write a book that tells the story of life in the camp.