“Unimaginable” is the word that comes to mind when considering the Nazi killing machine that generated the near genocide of the Jewish people. It is even harder to imagine becoming a part of that machine and helping it reach the ultimate goal of extermination. One example is of prisoners expediting the journey of others to the gas chambers during the Holocaust in Tadeusz Borowski’s short story “This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentleman.” All people are motivated by basic primal needs that make them do atrocious things in unavoidable circumstances, and this realization is a lesson to be learned by all readers. Borowski’s story about the prisoners of the Canada brigade shows the reality that the unimaginable can happen to anyone. Forced into a horror of horrors, the men’s …show more content…
They view helping with transports as a job that gets them food and security. Readers most likely view it as pure murder and evil, but they do it to save their own lives and for a bite of bread. Self-preservation can kill the man within in order to save the flesh and bones on the outside. Proof is that the men essentially turn into walking corpses because all humanity is lost in helping the monsters and their machine. An “us vs. them” mentality appears as Henri says “they can’t run out of people, or we’ll starve to death in this blasted camp. All of us live on what they bring” (696). Dehumanizing the men, women, and children that they usher to their deaths provides a physical and mental release. Their difficult jobs consist of sorting through bodies and valuables in new transports, and these simple men turning into unwilling monsters demonstrates that this can happen to anyone. None of them ever pictured themselves viewing infants as chickens and others as subhuman in order to get a bite to eat. However, to prove these points the narrator experiences an epiphany to show his