Ladies and Gentlemen, to the Gas Chamber by Tadeusz Borowski - Essay Example

of the of the Submitted Ladies and Gentlemen, to the Gas Chamber Q. By suggesting the kinds of defense mechanisms that deadened human responses to horror, ‘Ladies and Gentlemen, to the Gas Chamber’ helps the reader to understand how the Nazis managed to dominate so much of the world for so long. In your discussion, provide examples of such defensive behaviors in the story and whether the characters are “good people." Introduction Heartless and dumbfounding, Tadeusz Borowski’s ‘Ladies and Gentlemen, to the Gas Chamber’ nevertheless resonates with realism, and some welcome yet fleeting glimpses of human behavior.

Borowski indicates that it takes a superhuman effort to stay humanized during these sad episodes of history. This story, taken from the book We Were in Auschwitz (1946) which Borowski co-wrote with two other prisoners narrates the horrors and realities of daily life in Auschwitz, Birkenau, Poland during the Second World War. At times clinical and distant, Borowski’s narrative nevertheless breaks away for some seconds to intermittently show the bleak ray of hope in the midst of all the madness of life at this German concentration camp.

Discussion It is my contention that human nature in itself is neither good nor bad. We all enter life without any concept of morality. Even conscience, the voice of God in man, has to be brought out by example. Be it the early caveman who felled a wild buffalo for his carnivorous desires, or a Nazi prisoner of war in a concentration camp that did his victor’s bidding, both of these actions are dictated by an inborn desire to survive and prosper amid the crowd of others who do not matter that much.

Call it the survival of the fittest, as Charles Darwin did in the Origin of Species. After all, humans are but animals with intellect. Beneath the thin veneer of civilization rests a sleeping beast that has endured thousands of years of evolution. Even two thousand years of recorded and written historical progress cannot erase the original programming. So the eternal question springs to mind, are we by nature ‘good people’, as Henri is asked (Borowski, 2315). The response ‘Why ask stupid questions?

‘sums up the reality of the situation. It is wise to keep your head and save your life when others are losing theirs. It is the desire for survival and self-preservation that matters the most. When you are with your backs to the wall and the only hope of survival is to join the victorious, you join them without asking too many questions. The weak prey upon the weakest, offering them up as a sacrifice as a temporary appeasement to their masters. Borowski’s narrative also shows that despite all their sense of order, Hitler’s Third Reich was no more than a brutal but efficient killing machine that gassed and murdered between one and two and a half million people at Auschwitz.

The vivid imagery of a poet is visible at times in his use of excellent metaphor. The prisoners are led like lambs to the slaughter. First they are deprived of all their belongings and possessions, then stripped naked and deloused with a mild dose of the very gas that is to be their agent of death. Rich or poor, man, woman or child, few are spared and those that are will just be used to perform work till they drop dead or are unfit to carry on. The endpoint is the same gas chambers. This dehumanization is the first shock to the prisoners.

It makes them common, equal, like vermin that have no differentiating factor who have to be exterminated. The narrator in the story who most likely is a reflection of Borowski himself indicates there is nothing bad in siding with the victors when it is the only way to save your life. As he writes, there is no chance that any prisoner entering these premises would escape with their lives- the German security was waterproof. Even the unswerving bond of motherhood is broken here as a mother separated from her child disowns the same as she wants to live.

She is however treated harshly by a German officer who considers her an unwed mother (Borowski, 2317). Even God is forgotten, He cannot exist in such a setup as their belief system is totally shattered. Many holocaust survivors went on to become atheists in the face of the cruelty they had seen. Borowski writes in a state of calm, he has grown used to the utter callousness that he sees and nothing surprises him anymore. At times we are aware that the humanity in him screams out but has to be stifled-no one can afford to challenge the Germans.

There is a sense of utter disgust that people are being treated in such an inhuman way, but it is part of recorded history now. Borowski, or his reflected character in the story also wants to stop a beautiful blond young woman from going to her death but she is confident and brave in climbing the truck that will take her to her doom (Borowski, 2317). Conclusion Thus we see that Borowski’s narrative in ‘Ladies and Gentleman, to the Gas Chamber’ is a chilling reminder of the cruelty of the Third Reich.

The German killing machine murdered thousands of Jews without remorse. Even declining to tell them their fate in advance is a sign of compassion, the only compassion one can give in such a dastardly situation. Works Cited Borowski, Tardez. Ladies and Gentlemen, to the Gas Chamber. From the Norton Anthology of English Literature, Volume 2. W.W. Norton & Company.