Tadeusz Borowski
Paperback | Pages: 180 pages Rating: 4.16 | 5837 Users | 395 Reviews
Identify Appertaining To Books This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen
| Title | : | This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen |
| Author | : | Tadeusz Borowski |
| Book Format | : | Paperback |
| Book Edition | : | First Edition |
| Pages | : | Pages: 180 pages |
| Published | : | November 26th 1992 by Penguin Classics (first published 1947) |
| Categories | : | World War II. Holocaust. Short Stories. History. Nonfiction. War. European Literature. Polish Literature |
Interpretation As Books This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen
Tadeusz Borowski's concentration camp stories were based on his own experiences surviving Auschwitz and Dachau. In spare, brutal prose he describes a world where the will to survive overrides compassion and prisoners eat, work and sleep a few yards from where others are murdered; where the difference between human beings is reduced to a second bowl of soup, an extra blanket or the luxury of a pair of shoes with thick soles, and where the line between normality and abnormality completely vanishes. Published in Poland after the Second World War, these stories constitute a masterwork of world literature.Declare Books During This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen
| Original Title: | Proszę państwa do gazu |
| ISBN: | 0140186247 (ISBN13: 9780140186246) |
| Edition Language: | English URL https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/293306/this-way-for-the-gas-ladies-and-gentlemen-by-tadeusz-borowski/9780140186246/ |
| Setting: | Auschwitz(Poland) |
Rating Appertaining To Books This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen
Ratings: 4.16 From 5837 Users | 395 ReviewsAssessment Appertaining To Books This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen
Mostly skimmed, over the course of two or three hours, because it was either that or never reading it. I'd always been scared of this book, but, catching up on classic Polish literature (albeit books not about the war whenever possible), the book's brevity, and Borowski's place as one of the author case studies in The Captive Mind made me have a go. I read the introduction a couple of days ago - I like introductions in their own right - and figured that actually, I'd been right all along, IThe Dead Are Always RightTadeusz Borowski survived the horrors of Auschwitz, some of which are described in these stories, only to commit suicide. Despair is not an adequate explanation for such an act by a man who had experienced what he had. Neither, for me, is any other purely emotional reason. So I have spent the better part of the last three days thinking and writing in an attempt to understand the rationale, the redeeming purpose perhaps, of his suicide. Surely, I surmised, his death, as
Disturbing in the same way that the foreign film, "Son of Saul" was for me. It was unbearable to read more than a chapter or two at one time. The blurb on my book jacket conveys my thoughts perfectly."...This collection of concentration camp stories shows atrocious war crimes becoming an unremarkable part of a daily routine. Prisoners eat, work, sleep, and fall in love a few yards from where other prisoners are systematically slaughtered. The will to survive overrides compassion, and the line
This book is so powerful it can make you vomit while reading.This a holocaust book. I have read so many of these but this one is the most brutal in terms of vividly describing the scenes in the concentration camp - Auschwitz. I would not say that this is bereft of the haunting prose of say W. G. Sebald's "Austerlitz", the intriguing thesis of Viktor E. Frankl's "The Man's Search for Meaning" or the palpable honesty of Elie Wiesel's "Night". (Note: the most popular Holocaust book by Anne Frank,
Passage from this book:"The four of us became involved in a heated discussion...by maintaining that in this war morality, national solidarity, patriotism and the ideals of freedom, justice and human dignity had all slid off man like a rotten rag. We said that there is no crime that a man will not commit in order to save himself. And, having saved himself, he will commit crimes for increasingly trivial reasons; he will commit them first out of duty, then from habit, and finally---for pleasure."
I found this book very difficult to read. Not like Joyce or Proust or Faulkner, but because when exactly do you read this? In the evening after a good dinner? No! Well, at bedtime then? Not unless you want nightmares. I have read a few of these concentration camp memoirs, which, strangely insultingly, are classified as FICTION when they are, of course, the truth. But here, in the concentration camp world, reality reads like fiction, it is true. Tadeusz Borowski writes with a heavy black humour
Tadeusz Borowski contributed articles, stories and poems to underground Polish publications during World War II which caused him to be arrested by the Gestapo in February 1943 and sent to Auschwitz were he spent almost two years before being transferred to Dachau. Borowski factual seemingly detached point of view can cause the reader to question Borowski's basic humanity. However, in retrospect it appears that Borowski was profoundly traumatized. Initially he took refuge in the belief that the
0 Comments:
Post a Comment