'Will We Ever Be So Young Again?'

On July 2, 1944, the Polish poet and fiction writer Tadeusz Borowski begins a letter to his mother written while he was a prisoner in Auschwitz: 

“What’s of greatest interest first: the eggs are amazingly fresh and very much desired, the butter is wonderful, straight from the cow. And the cheese as well.”

 

Borowski was not Jewish but a veteran of twentieth-century barbarism. He was born in 1922 in the Soviet Ukraine to Polish parents. His father was shipped to Siberia in 1926 to work on the infamous White Sea Canal. When he was eight, his mother was sent to a settlement on the Yenisei River, also in Siberia. Borowski was cared for by an aunt. In 1932, the Polish Red Cross arranged for the family to be reunited and sent to Warsaw in exchange for Communist prisoners. Borowski attended a school run by Franciscan monks and, after the start of the Nazi occupation, a clandestine underground school. That’s when he started writing. Among his earliest work was a translation of the fool’s songs in Twelfth Night. He published his first collection of poems in an edition of 165. In 1943, at age twenty-one, Borowski was arrested by the Gestapo and sent to Auschwitz.

 

Later in the letter to his mother, he writes: “I, myself, am, of course, well and cheerful, a normal person who accepts the present as though it were already the past, who is full of hope and not without a future.” He adds: “Will we ever be so young again? Life truly is short. And is art truly long?”

 

In late 1944, Borowski was transferred from Auschwitz to the Dautmergen sub-camp of Natzweiler-Struthof in Germany, and finally to Dachau. He was among the prisoners liberated by American troops on May 1, 1945. The number tattooed on his arm was 119198.

 

After the war, Borowski began writing prose fiction. A collection of his stories was translated into English and published by Viking in 1967. Philip Roth later included that volume, This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen (trans. Barbara Vedder), in a series he edited for Penguin, Writers from the Other Europe, alongside titles by Milan Kundera, Danilo Kis, Bruno Schulz and others. That slender 1980 paperback still sits on my shelf though brown, brittle and a bit ragged. I remember reading those stories as though they were a sacred text. I had never read anything so grim. A warning: events recounted in his stories are shockingly violent. Atrocities are performed casually by German guards and kapos among the prisoners, and Borowski narrates them in a voice almost clinical. There’s no melodrama.

 

Finally, in 2021, Yale University Press published a more complete edition, Here in Our Auschwitz and Other Stories (trans. Madeline G. Levine), with a foreword by Timothy Snyder, author of Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (2010). The earlier collection’s title story is here translated as “Ladies and Gentlemen, Welcome to the Gas.” Its narrator works on the ramp beside the railroad tracks in a concentration camp (as Borowski did), unloading the train cars filled with prisoners. He pulls back from the scene and describes the larger context. In effect, he tries to make sense of the Holocaust and suggests it may continue without end: 

 

“The transports grow into weeks, months, years. When the war ends, they will count up the incinerated. They will calculate a total of four and a half million. The bloodiest battle of the war, the greatest victory of united and unanimous Germany. Ein Reich, ein Volk,  ein Führer – and four crematoriums. . . . The Jews will burn, the Poles will burn, the Russians will burn . . . . The gas chambers will be improved, made more efficient, will be more cunningly disguised.”

 

Later, Borowski turned to journalism and joined Poland’s Communist Party. His collected works, published in Poland in 1954, totaled five volumes. His letters reveal Borowski’s tortured disillusionment with the Stalinists. In West Berlin, he had acquired a copy of The God That Failed. In 1951, age twenty-eight, he asphyxiated himself with gas from a stove.

 

[The letter is collected in Postal Indiscretions: The Correspondence of Tadeusz Borowski (trans. Alicia Nitecki, Northwestern University Press, 2007).]