SOURCE: “Human Dialogues Are Born,” in Nation, Vol. 224, No. 16, April 23, 1977, pp. 504-05.

In the following excerpt, Sanders discusses This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen in the context of twentieth-century Eastern European “literature of atrocity.”

The plight of the survivor has become a familiar theme in the literature of the holocaust. According to Terrence des Pres, the survivor “is the first of civilized men to live beyond the compulsions of culture; beyond a fear of death which can only be assuaged by insisting that life itself is worthless.” Much of what has come to be known as the “literature of atrocity” has been written by Eastern Europeans who were themselves victims of Nazi persecution. It is not surprising, therefore, that descriptions of the most devastating assaults on human dignity are to be found in their works. In his preface to the recently republished paperback edition of Tadeusz...