Review: This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen

By Stonewall-Jackson Collins

Some books bruise the soul instead of caressing it. Tadeusz Borowski’s This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen is one of those — not a novel of invention, but of unbearable recollection disguised as fiction. It’s the sort of writing that makes you realize why survivors sometimes had to lie a little just to tell the truth.

Like how I, in the above compression story song, This Way for Destruction, and here (https://medium.com/@stonewalljacksoncollins/this-way-for-destruction-citizens-and-guests-0e7d7a908b16) retell Borowski’s work using Japanese kaiju.

The horror in the ordinary

Borowski was a Polish prisoner in Auschwitz. He wasn’t an observer from a moral balcony; he was knee-deep in the filth, assigned to unload the cattle cars that arrived packed with people who would be ash within the hour. He wrote these stories afterward, in flat prose that sounds like someone reporting the weather. That’s the genius and the sickness of it. There’s no gothic thunder, no swelling…