The Unequivocal Truth of the Holocaust

Visiting Anne Frank’s house in Amsterdam, I witnessed the way Jewish people had to live during the time of the Holocaust, many of them not seeing the sun for days, and hiding in secret passages of their home. I was completely awestruck at the extremes that the Jews went to escape the terrors of the Holocaust. If you have gone to Washington D.C. and visited the Holocaust Museum, you may think you can conceptualize the horrors of the Holocaust, but you are oblivious until you read “Ladies and Gentlemen, to the Gas Chamber” by Tadeusz Borowski. Borowski takes a different approach to expressing the abhorrence of the Holocaust. The story is told through the eyes of a Polish prisoner who helps unload thousands of Jews from cattle cars and directs them either to the gas chambers to be executed or to the work camp. With every technique that Borowski implements in the story, such as the nauseating effect of the unloading process, the naivetй of prisoners through the deception of the Nazis, and comparing prisoners to animals, he is able to produce a deeply disturbing effect on the reader.

The Polish narrator and his friend Henri are more fortunate than the other prisoners because they receive food parcels from people outside the camp. In the beginning of the story, the narrator and a few of his “friends” sit on top of bunks in one of the blocks eating “extravagantly baked bread” (2774) and plotting about what goods they want to smuggle from the next transport, specifically a bottle of champagne and a pair of shoes. The transport is misleading because it is depicted as something that is bountiful and desirable; however the transport is not just filled with goods. When the transport finally arrives, the reader is appalled at imagery of “human faces pale and crumpled, disheveled as though they had not had enough sleep” (2778). Borowski utilizes this technique to dramatize the shock on the reader when he realizes what the transport actually is. The prisoners are sardined into the transports to the extent that the air is thin, and people are pushing their heads out of tiny, barred windows for oxygen. Prisoners stampeded out of the cattle car “like a stupefied, blind river that seeks a new bed” (2779) and immediately their belongings were seized from them. The unloading process fills the reader with a sense of dismay. Borowski’s technique in describing the unloading process gives the reader a first person view of it all. This perspective enables the reader to experience the turmoil firsthand. There are corpses everywhere, naked, convulsing, and swollen. The laborers of “Canada” pick up children by any of their limbs and heave them on the truck along with “huge, bloated, swollen corpses” (2784) while “[kicking] out of the way stray children” (2784). The barbarous, heartless treatment of the Jews is so revolting to the reader that he may get butterflies in his stomach. Borowski developed a deeply heart-wrenching example of the unloading process in the narrative.

Another technique that Borowski employs is the way he exposes the naivetй of the prisoners due to the Nazis’ deception. The Nazis tell the Jewish prisoners to bring their baggage with them because they are going to start new lives. However, when the prisoners unload from the cattle cars their bags are “torn from their hands, coats pulled off them, handbags snatched, and sunshades taken away” (2779). The reader condoles with the prisoners because the “gold, the money, the diamonds which they providently conceal in the folds and seams of their clothing, in the heels of their shoes, in recesses of their bodies,” (2786) will be futile or lost in the working camp and the extermination chambers. The prisoners are so flustered, screaming provocative phrases, and are mistakenly reassured by the sight of a Red Cross ambulance. Little do they know, the Red Cross ambulance carries “the gas which will poison [them]” (2779). This is the most deceptive ploy that the