logo

43 pages 1 hour read

Tadeusz Borowski

This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen

Fiction | Short Story Collection | Adult | Published in 1946

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Story 11: “A Visit”

Story 11 Summary: “A Visit”

In his mind, Tadek “visits” his early days at the camp. He remembers the men and the women (his long-lost girlfriend somewhere among them), and the intense pain of the bayonet wound he received on his first walk from the train. One man stumbled out of the train, desperate for fresh air, threw his arm around a man he didn’t know and called him “brother” (174). Another man seemed dead in a pile of bodies that suffocated on the stifling train, but he sprung to life when someone tried to steal his boots. Tadek saw the prisoners building guard towers and crematoria, suffering and struck down by disease and hunger, people hoarding stolen jewelry and women selling their bodies for food. Those who were ill and sent to the crematorium pleaded for their stories to be remembered and told, However, Tadek can only see others; he cannot envision himself. He feels “homesick for the people [he] saw then” (176) and acknowledges that the man with the boots survived and became an electrical engineer, the man who staggered off of the train now owned a successful bar, and Tadek was the person who the man embraced and called “brother” (176). 

Story 11 Analysis

Tadek has disassociated himself from his memories of the camp, something he says a poet once called “concentration-camp mentality” (176). He longs to feel a kinship with these people whom he endured so much with but can’t seem to help setting himself apart in his mind. Perhaps this is because he survived, or perhaps it is because he isn’t Jewish, so he experienced a certain measure of privilege in the camp rather than being included in the systematic extermination. Tadek speaks about the camp as if the experience isn’t a part of him, but something he visits in his memory. He is, however, fulfilling the final wish of those who were sent to the crematorium by telling the story of the camp and how they died. Tadek describes “a girl who had once been mine” (174), presumably talking about his fiancée. As Tadek describes, he saw her with a shaved head and open sores, an occurrence that happened in real life when Borowski was sent on an errand to the women’s camp to transport the bodies of dead infants. Reportedly, he said to her, “Don’t worry: our children won’t be bald” (16). 

blurred text
blurred text
blurred text
blurred text