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Should David Irving, Holocaust denier, be allowed to run tours to Poland? [246]
Borowski was not a Jew and this was reflected in his writings. In sharp contrast with Anne Frank's type of perspective which has certain dignity with the victims and the events they endured, Borowski does away with any ideas even approaching nobility, portraying as bleak a picture of humanity as it would seem possible to paint. In his stories, everyone is debased, whether they be Nazi or Jew, for within the concentration camps the outside world modesty has been stripped away leaving only a human nature that is completely corrupt. No-one is virtuous and everyone has a degree of complicity, including Borowski himself, for his own sense of guilt shows through.
Some fragments:
Showing how the prisoners become as, if not more, morally bankrupt than the Nazis:
I don't know why, but I am furious, simply furious with these people - furious because I must be here because of them. I feel no pity. I am not sorry they're going to the gas chamber. Damn them all! I could throw myself at them, beat them with my fists.Harrowing images. He avoids however any explicit judgmental language:
Several other men are carrying a small girl with only one leg. They hold her by the arms and the one leg. Tears are running down her face and she whispers faintly: 'Sir, it hurts, it hurts...'. They throw her on the truck on top of the corpses. She will burn alive along with them.The guilt and bewilderment of the situation:
Why is it that nobody cries out, nobody spits in their faces, nobody jumps at their throats. We doff our caps to the S.S. men returning from the little wood; if our name is called we obediently go with them to die, and - we do nothing. We starve, we are drenched by rain, we are torn from our families. What is the mystery? This strange power of one man over another? This insane passivity that cannot be overcome?As a truck of women are driven to their death through the male camp, they shout out:
'Save us! We are going to the gas chambers! Save us!' And they rode slowly past us - the ten thousand silent men -and then disappeared from sight. Not one of us made a move, not one of us lifted a hand.Life that is completely devoid of any reason to hope:
Do you really think that, without the hope that such a world is possible, that the rights of man will be restored again, we could stand the concentration camp even for one day? It is that very hope that makes people go without a murmur to the gas chambers, keeps them from risking a revolt, paralyses them into numb inactivity.The population is regularly trimmed of those whose 'useful' lives have ended, through selections:
They already knew about the selection. Secretly, they dressed their wounds, trying to make them cleaner and fewer; they tore off their bandages, massaged their muscles, splashed themselves with water so as it be fresher and more agile for the evening. They fought for their existence fiercely and heroically. But some no longer cared. They moved only to avoid being whipped, devoured grass and sticky clay to keep from feeling too much hunger; they walked around in a daze, like living corpses.Borowski questions how justice in the traditional sense would be an adequate concept within this exceptional context:
'But do you think that they', she pointed with her chin in an indefinite direction, 'can go unpunished?' 'I think that for those who have suffered unjustly, justice alone is not enough. They want the guilty to suffer unjustly too. Only this will be understood as justice'This idea is reinforced later as a character who talks of the hope of things returning to a civilised and just world states:
'And yet, first of all, I should like to slaughter one or two men, just to throw off the concentration camp mentality'