Journey into the Whirlwind, by Eugenia Semyonovna; This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, by Tadeusz Borowski
Eckstein, George
JOURNEY INTO THE WHIRLWIND, by Eugenia Semyonovna Ginzburg. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World. 418 pp. $6.95. THIS WAY FOR THE GAS, LADIES AND GENTLE MEN, by Tadeusz Borowski. New York:...
...perhaps we should expose ourselves to these harrowing recordings, not out of masochistic fascination, but so that we finally may come to terms with this essential ingredient of life in our epoch...
...BOOKS In the midst of this all-perverting brutality, there are flashes of humaneness—unsentimental and offhanded...
...Is it the absurdity of the man (in "A Visit"), who tumbled out of the cattle car after days spent stifled among living corpses, breathing again and hugging you— "brother, brother...
...But are we so sure we have learned the lessons of the camps, that key phenomenon of the mid-twentieth century...
...the Trotskyites who were considered part of the "family...
...She does not go as far as some of her fellow prisoners who upheld their belief in Stalin himself through various intellectual somersaults, or who sharply disassociated themselves from their non-Communist fellow victims (social revolutionaries, religious sectarians...
...Perhaps we can use a reminder from time to time...
...one of them ("A Day at Harmenz") was previously published in this country in a different translation as part of Maria Kuncewicz's anthology of new Polish writing (The Modern Polish Mind, Little, Brown, 1962...
...There always have been two basically different approaches to the camp experience in the concentration-camp literature...
...But she never ceased to have faith in the Soviet regime, or to be "amazed" at what was going on in "our" prisons and labor camps...
...who now is a civil en gineer with your city...
...Ginzburg, who was on the staff of a newspaper and the wife of a high functionary in the Tartar republic, is a woman of obvious integrity and steadfastness...
...The whole camp lives for a while on a "good transport"--one from a wealthy Jewish community whose supply of food and barterable valuables (the gold goes to the SS) is taken from the doomed on arrival by the privileged Sonderkommando...
...It takes too much in tellectual effort . . . [to fit] the events, things and people I have seen into this unchanging difficult world chiseled out of stone...
...Yet Borowski does not take the easy way of denunciation and disgust, but tries to go to the very bottom of his experience...
...New York: Harcourt, Brace & World...
...THIS WAY FOR THE GAS, LADIES AND GENTLE MEN, by Tadeusz Borowski...
...A Day at Harmenz" illustrates the constant infighting, the briberies and thefts, aggressive group action, and sly deceptions on which survival depends—and also the unspeakable brutality with which the weaker prisoners are eliminated...
...Borowski suffered at the hands of a clearcut enemy, both class and national...
...To be able to participate in the camp apparatus, to wiggle an "easy" job, a place in the infirmary on a certain day, a pair of shoes, an extra bowl of soup—matters of life and death...
...Eventu ally, as inmate of one of the camps that were part of the Auschwitz complex, he rose to become a minor functionary...
...EUGENIA GINSBURG wrote her Journey into the Whirlwind, the experience of 18 years (1937 to 1955) in Stalin's and post-Stalin jails and arctic camps, soon after her return to "normal" life...
...at times a hospital orderly, at times the foreman of a small labor gang...
...But recently, by coincidence, an example of each of the two approaches has been published in this country —belatedly, but hopefully not too late...
...3.95...
...There is a class society in camp, and he himself belongs to one of the privileged groups: he is young and healthy, Polish (pack ages from home...
...Of camp conditions she gives the usual picture— neglect, starvation, brutality, and indifference, relieved by occasional bribery and cooperation, help and tolerance...
...And throughout her tribulations she has remained a faithful Communist, thanking the Soviet system for having "given her everything, the very endurance which was now keeping me from going under...
...Somehow this attitude is characterized by eternal amazement...
...The most interesting aspect of this book is the political attitude of the author...
...In a way, the whole book is a collection of examples...
...Borowski was a 21-year-old Polish poet and member of the Communist underground when he was caught and imprisoned by the Nazis in 1943...
...Perhaps, for a moment, we stop munching our TV crackers...
...from there it filters down through barters and services rendered...
...for the book does not add anything basically new to our knowledge of the conditions and methods of Stalin's investigations, "justice," and penal institutions...
...But experiences such as these still fail to raise any doubt in her mind about the basic premises of the regime...
...he killed himself with gas...
...For six years, Borowski tried to fit his ex perience and to fit himself into what he calls this "World of Stone...
...The absurdity of existence in camp thus haunts "normal" life— you cannot escape it...
...Both are motivated by the urge to "tell the world...
...Borowski has an unerring eye and ear for the grotesqueness, the absurdity of life in this condition...
...he stresses them, because they were the bitter essence of life in the Nazi concentration camp...
...To mention one more: in the "Death of Schillinger" the author tells the story of one of the most brutal Nazi Lagerfuhrer who is eventually shot by a naked Jewish girl whom he tries to pull out of a mass being driven to the gas chambers...
...One might be called the lament or the accusation, the outcry against an inhumanity that seems beyond our understanding...
...Even the Russian public has been exposed to these revelations in politically perhaps more radical form in Alexander Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich...
...Nothing really new has been written in either of these two veins since the early sixties which saw such important (and largely neglected) examples of the second approach as Jorge Semprun's The Long Voyage and Piotr Rawicz's Blood from the Sky...
...As he lies dying in pain, he groans, "0 God, what have I done to deserve such suffering...
...All this—so indispensable for survival—had a price, a heavy price including one's own brutalization...
...After several years of this kind of existence, how is one again to live a "normal" life...
...he has contact with the political group that is struggling for positions of influence in the camp administration...
...Or is it the guy who lay in a heap of corpses who suddenly kicked when someone tried to pull off his boots— the prosperous owner of a bar now, many years after the holocaust...
...The stories collected in this volume have long been published abroad, some as early as 1946...
...By then, it had become the world of his own old ideals, a Communist state...
...This in itself is a sign of the halfheartedness of the political "thaw...
...In "Auschwitz, our Home," Borowski blames hope itself—"hope that makes people go without a murmur to the gas chambers, keeps them from risking revolt . . . compels man to hold on to one more day of life...
...Who wants to read them—to stir up painful memories, to unbury the dead...
...He succeeds...
...She seems overjoyed that the publication date has been advanced—" that the great Leninist truths have again come into their own in our country and Party...
...Bruno Bettelheim was the first to write of the camp situation in this complex perspective...
...By contrast, in her Journey into the Whirlwind, Eugenia Ginzburg credits hope with helping people survive...
...The other approach, both more political and more existential, tries to probe below the surface of the phenomenon, to find the ultimate meaning in the very absurdity, the grim irony, the savage contradictions which life and death in the camps forced upon inmates and jailers alike...
...The author describes these functionaries, who virtually ran the camp administration for the SS, from the Kapo down to the privileged "Special Kommandos," such as those who received the new arrivals from the cattle trains and had access to some of their possessions...
...She wrote of her experience in the hope that her grandchildren might be permitted to read about them by 1980...
...BOROWSYI WRITES of tie prisoner's resentment over his own inhumanity that he cannot turn against the SS but vents upon his fellow victims whose "stupidity" brings about his hardened attitude and cruel actions...
...In July 1951 he gave up the struggle...
...WHAT, YET MORE BOOKS on the concentration camps...
...New York: The Viking Press...
...He was not, like Eugenia Ginzburg, the victim of a regime with which the prisoner, however disillusioned, still felt some sort of solidarity...
...In the curious twilight of the current intellectual and publishing scene in Russia, the book has been more or less sanctioned for publication abroad (first in Italy, now in this and other countries...
...These short pieces are remarkable in the unsentimental, unflinching frankness with which they face the universal brutality, including that of the inmates themselves and especially of the various camp functionaries among them...
...The NKVD ran a thoroughly organized shop, hence "the cleaner the jail, the more to eat, the more courteous the jailers—the closer to death...
...BOOKS Toward the end of her "Journey," her path recrosses that of her chief investigator, who now himself is dying of hunger and exposure in an arctic camp, and she meets a simple Volga-German Baptist who sacrifices his life to save hers from a brutal overseer...
...TODAY, OVER 16 YEARS LATER, we are watching a TV newsreel from Vietnam (CBS, December, 1967): GI's "disposing" of some Viet Cong dead by swinging the thin corpses from a canvas stretcher through the air onto a growing heap which is then picked up and carried away in a net by helicopter to be dropped unceremoniously somewhere, anywhere...
...Borowski describes the prisoner as he lives constantly at the edge of the abyss, hovers at the thin line that separates life and death— death ever-present as well as utter degradation and exaltation...
...What is normal...
...To be able to influence decisions, assignments to work or to extermination, to have access to barter or bribe, to be part of an organized group—power over life and death of others...
...TADEUSZ BoxowsxI, who is some 15 years younger than Eugenia Ginzburg, wrote the stories that make up the slim volume of This Way to the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen during the early postwar years...
...JOURNEY INTO THE WHIRLWIND, by Eugenia Semyonovna Ginzburg...
...The man who tells of this "irony of fate" is himself a member of the Sonderkommando who (a second irony) drove this girl and her group into the gas chambers after this incident and (triple irony) is liquidated with all his col leagues in the end, after the Sonderkommando's last-minute attempt at saving themselves through a revolt...
...160 pp...
...Borowski does not evade these unpleasant facts...
...You can't afford to go soft: such as the passage in "The Man with the Package" where the Prussian-Jewish doctor from Berlin teaches his assistant understanding for the camp "Schreiber" who has fallen from grace and who—doomed, and knowing he is doomed—yet clings to a small package with a few belongings on his last walk, naked, to the gas...
...Does it not reappear in new guises: in the defoliation and "relocation" programs in South Vietnam, in the tribal wars in Africa...
...in Russia it is still only circulated in manuscript form...
...The title alone shows his very different cast of mind...
Vol. 15 • March 1968 • No. 2
