Tadeusz Borowski's This Way To The Gas, Ladies And Gentlemen

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In the short story "This Way to the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen" Tadeusz Borowski offers a poignant insight into the reality of Auschwitz, which was the largest concentration and death camp where about 6,000 were exterminated in the four gas chambers each day.
"This is where they load freight for Birkenau: supplies for the construction of the camp, and people for the gas chambers. Trucks drive around, load up lumber, cement, people—a regular daily routine" (1457).
Auschwitz was a place where the systematic dehumanization of human beings, reduced to piles goods to disassemble, was part of the daily agenda, as described in these verses:
"A huge, multicoloured wave of people loaded down with luggage pours from the train like a blind, mad river trying to find a new bed. But before they have a chance to recover, …show more content…
"Listen, Henri, are we good people?’
‘That’s stupid. Why do you ask?’
‘You see, my friend, you see, I don’t know why, but I am furious, simply furious with these people—furious because I must be here because of them. I feel no pity. I am not sorry they’re going to the gas chamber. Damn them all! I could throw myself at them, beat them with my fists. It must be pathological, I just can’t understand . . .’ (1462).

In these verses, the author points out how a man in that condition develops a pathological aversion to other miserable human beings, with whom, however, they share the same fate almost as they considered them responsible for such massacre.

The brutal realism that permeates the whole story gives an idea of the sense of complete estrangement that the author must have developed to contain the horror that no being so-called human can stand without losing one's
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