Stylistic Choices in Borowski's "This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen" Anonymous College

Tadeusz Borowski is an inherently tragic author. His life as a guard in a German concentration camp is something to be pitied at best. While Borowski writes about his horrible experiences as a guard in his collection of short stories This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, he seems to retain a sort of dissociation throughout his writing. This deflection of tragedy and treating of guards as ‘cogs in a machine’ enhances the horror of the concentration camp and the idea of the industrial nature of the Holocaust. In addition to this, Borowski breaks up the descriptions of menial tasks performed with horrific descriptions of the brutal mistreatment of the Jews by the Germans, using these scenes to shatter our hope that there can be anything intrinsically good in such a situation.

Borowski’s opening story begins with what almost seems to be a joke: “Our striped suits are back from the tanks of Cyclone B solution, an efficient killer of lice in clothing and of men in gas chambers.” (Borowski 1) While this statement is obviously horrific, the author places it at the very beginning of the story, in almost a conversational manner, to expose the horrible acts committed in this camp by the Germans, while also implicating all the men in...