This Way For The Gas Ladies And Gentlemen Sparknotes

There are many literary works based on World War II and the Holocaust, including one we read this semester: Tadeusz Borowski's “This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen”. However, it is not told from the typical perspective. We typically only see stories from the Jewish Holocaust victims, but this story is told by a different type of prisoner. The narrator is part of the group who were forced to collaborate with the Nazis. His job was to unload the new prisoners from the trains, and as a reward, he was allowed to loot the cars and keep any food they found. What makes this story, so harrowing, is how ignorant the Jews coming in are of their future. The narrator asks his friend Henri how they are supposed to answer when the new prisoners ask

The men who are unloading these new transports are just as much victims as everyone else. We tend to only focus on the Jewish victims, but Borowski uses this story to highlight how the Nazis affected all kinds of people. In reality, the Nazis did not do most of the heavy lifting around the concentration camps. They simply used other types of prisoners to do their dirty work. We see the emotional and moral turmoil that the narrator goes through in this short story. He likely represents many who had similar roles in the Holocaust. Many of these prisoners were simply trying to survive, and in order to do that, they had to obey the Nazis' orders. The narrator admits near the end of the story that “It is true, others may be dying, but one is somehow still alive, one has enough food, enough strength to work. . .”. Then we will be able to do that. These prisoners were forced to maintain a sense of normalcy when unloading the new prisoners, even though they were completely aware of the horrors that awaited