Tadeusz Borowski

I first saw the name Tadeusz Borowski around 1970, when the novelist Jerome Charyn included one of the Pole’s stories, “This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen,” in a fiction anthology he edited. The title sounded like a Lenny Bruce routine but the story was ruthlessly clinical and documentary-like in its depiction of life in Auschwitz. It was especially shocking in the midst of the tamer, more fashionable work Charyn had also chosen. A collection of Borowski’s stories had been translated into English and published by Viking in 1967. Philip Roth later included that volume, This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, in a series he edited for Penguin, Writers from the Other Europe, alongside titles by Milan Kundera, Danilo Kis, Bruno Schulz and others. That’s the book on my shelf, a slender 1980 edition now brown, brittle and a bit ragged – the testimony of a man who survived for two years in Auschwitz, Dautmergen-Natzweiler and Dachau-Allach. The number tattooed on his arm was 119198. He was not a Jew.

Those of us who have admired (“enjoyed” sounds indecent) Borowski’s work are pleased that Northwestern University Press has published Postal Indiscretions: The Correspondence of Tadeusz Borowski. The 384-page volume is translated by Alicia Nitecki and edited by Tadeusz Drewnowski. Ruth Franklin reviews the book in the Sept. 24 issue of The New Republic, and includes her translation of four poems by Borowski. Here’s Franklin on Borowski’s stories:

“This Auschwitz, in contrast to the myths that sprang up immediately in the war's aftermath, is not a place of martyrdom or heroism. It is a place where inmates higher up in the camp hierarchy, the Polish political prisoners and others with special privileges, jeer at the Jews and Gypsies lower on the totem pole; where even a minor offense will be brutally avenged; where a prisoner, wondering if his girlfriend might have been sent to the gas chamber, muses, `So what, what's gone is gone.’ All this is recounted in a chillingly unsentimental and brazenly nihilistic voice that emphasizes its own detachment from the horrors that it records. Yet this detachment, it soon becomes clear, is a literary device for containing the speaker's fury, which bubbles up between the lines of each story even as he tries to choke it back.”

All that Franklin says is accurate except the phrase “brazenly nihilistic.” Yes, Borowski’s narrative voice is cool and detached, and never injects sentiment into the horrors it chronicles, but a nihilist revels in horror or denies its horrific nature. No sane and thoughtful reader of Borowski’s fiction can conclude he is enjoying the barbarism he witnesses. This is from “This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen,” as translated from the Polish by Barbara Vedder:

“I see four Canada men lugging a corpse: a huge, swollen female corpse. Cursing, dripping wet from the strain, they kick out of their way some stray children who have been running all over the ramp, howling like dogs. The men pick them up by the collars, heads, arms, and toss them inside the trucks, on top of the heaps. The four men have trouble lifting the fat corpse on to the car, they call others for help, and all together they hoist up the mound of meat. Big, swollen, puffed-up corpses are being collected from all over the ramp; on top of them are piled the invalids, the smothered, the sick, the unconscious. The heap seethes, howls, groans. The driver starts the motor, the truck begins rolling.”

Jan Kott, author of Shakespeare, Our Contemporary, contributed an introduction to the Penguin edition. Of the stories he writes:

“Borowski describes Auschwitz like an entomologist. The image of ants recurs many times, with their incessant march, day and night, night and day, from the ramp to the crematorium and from the barracks to the baths. The most terrifying thing in Borowski’s stories is the icy detachment of the author.”

Borowski started as a poet and turned to prose fiction after the war. Later he turned again, to journalism, joining and serving Poland’s Communist Party. His collected works, published in Poland in 1954, totaled five volumes. According to Franklin, the newly translated letters reveal Borowski’s tortured disillusion with the Stalinists. In West Berlin, he had acquired a copy of The God That Failed. In 1951, age 28, he asphyxiated himself with gas from a stove.