This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen Critical Overview

This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen Critical Overview

Borowski's story "This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen" first appeared in Poland the spring of 1946, little more than a year after the Nazis began evacuating Auschwitz's more than 50,000 prisoners (including Borowski). The story was included in the 1947 volume, We Were in Auschwitz, which collected short pieces by Borowski along with the works of fellow Poles Janusz Nel Siedlecki and Krystyn Olszewski. In their collective Preface, the authors explained that they hoped to talk "without subterfuge, openly" about the horrors they saw in Auschwitz. Their publication was an early attempt to diminish the already developing legend of the concentration camp: that in this place of horror, heroism supplanted cowardice, and prisoners worked together for the good of their fellow sufferers.

Two years later, Borowski's first collection, also titled This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, was published in Poland, making Borowski one of the...
(read more)