Two Fictionalized Holocaust Memoirs
Tadeusz Borowski and Imre Kértesz

     Both of these important narratives reveal events of the experience of those imprisoned by the Nazi regime through an interior consciousness. The tone of the consciousness is unesxpected in both cases, forcing the reader to shift his or her stance in rather discomfiting and uncomfortable ways.

 

Tadeusz Borowski. from Poland. Child of two parents sent to labor camps for suspected political activity. Raised by distant relatives and in boarding schools. Himself sent to prison for writing literature in Polish.

"Ladies and Gentlemen, To the Gas Chamber"
     Perspective that of a non-Jewish inmate, struggling to endure the hardships imposed upon him. Is able to distance himself from the horror of what is happening outside through depersonalizing the gas victims, later by quantifying. In essence, his attempts to create the necessary distance is unsucessful once he becomes witness to what is really happening.
695. The incongruous quality of "efficient killer of lice and people.
696. First descriptions of “Canada” contrast the nation and its attributes (maple forests) with the block (French perfume, diamonds).
The narrator complains that there may not be any more transports, and so no more goods filtered into the camp from Canada. “Dammit, they’ll run out of people.” Shocking to the reader.
698. At the platform, the goods for the expansion of the camp is conflated with the people for the gas chambers. “lumber, cement, people.”
Hierarchy in the camps, and among Canada—here the Greeks are low man.
699. The Greeks here are relieved that it will be a human cargo, not a heavy material cargo.
The SS men talk about mundane matters—home, family—while they are getting ready to receive those to be slaughtered.
Men with hair alarming to the narrator after months of shaved heads.
The law of the camp that people going to their deaths be deceived until the last moment.
The red cross cars also deceptive. And these are the cars that will carry the gas.
701. ** Part of his effort to intellectualize the transport is to translate the cargo into numbers, and even to label them, finally, numerically.
702. Strangely, it is pity for the narrator that is evoked by the woman who is forced to take the carcasses of the dead infants who dies in the boxcars. Provoking the question to Henri—“are we good people?”
704. The heartbreaking sight of the woman who attempts to deny her own child in an effort to be sent to the right, instead of to the trucks where women with children are sent.
704. The beautiful blonde woman unwilling to be deceived, or to be granted special favors offered to the healthy. Goes to the trucks. Also, must be extremely distressing for our narrator.

 

Imre Kértesz. Hungarian. (b. 1929)
     The Hungarians in Budapest among the last to be conscripted into the Naxi lanor camps/ victims of death camps. We say "fictionalized" autobiography, but we see that Kertesz himself would have been 14 at the time these Hungarians were there.

Fateless
Note that the first part of this narrative is very similar to the Borowski—it is the arrival of the trains and the chaotic first hours in the camp. Georg is privileged to go to the left in this case—to become a worker instead of to the crematorium.
On pg. 56 there is the note of beauty in the arrival to Auswitz. Incongruity.
57-8. Is the naiveté credible—that he would think of these strange “convicts” and not realize he was about to become one of them. (Note that he and all the other boys keep up this illusion until they are required to put on the striped suits and the convict’s hats.)
58. Note the stereotyping of Jews both by looks and by untrustworthiness.
59. The German soldiers are a comfort because they are well-groomed and calm.
63. Note that the doctor seems relieved when Georg says he is 16—this doctor is feeling bad about the number of humans he is sending to their death.
64. There is even the kind of pride in being chosen—best illustrated when he is disappointed when the man with the belly is also chosen (Georg thought him to be over the hill).
66. Optimism about playing ball on the green soccer fields. And about the water, which they guzzle despite the warning that it is undrinkable.