Mercedes Andrade
10/6/17
A Reflection on “This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen” In this story, Tadeusz Borowski describes what is an almost a typical day at Auschwitz, a concentration camp during World War II. The events that the narrator participates in and is a witness of, describes how there is a loss of morality in situations that involve life or death. Borowski takes a different route when writing about events during this gruesome time. The story is unemotional and unsympathetic, as he describes scenes involving innocent Jews experiencing dehumanization. In some instances, he refers to Jews as “sheep,” the dead corpses as “a mound of meat,” and innocent babies as “naked little monsters…with… bloated bellies” (Borowski). He goes
Borowski is very straight forward in the book This way to the gas, ladies and gentlemen because it emphasizes the dark nature of the events that happened in the Nazi concentration camps. In the short story “This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen,” Borowski explains how a few people in the concentration camps would get extra food by taking it from the people who were going to be taken to the gas chambers without feeling bad about it. He also details how the infants were sent to their deaths as soon as they reached the concentration camps. Borowski does this because it lets the reader see how indifferent and cruel the S.S. Soldiers were to the people in the camps as well as how numb to the environment the people in the camps became.
You see it at the zoo, you see it at shelters, you see wild animals in a cage, which thoroughly describes how the Jewish community was treated at the time of the treacherous period known as the Holocaust, which started in 1939. The Holocaust was a period when the Nazi party and Hitler put millions of Jewish people in concentration camps, where they would then die or work until death. However, they were treated with dehumanizing qualities, similar to how a wild animal would be treated. In the novel Night by Elie Wiesel, the Schutzstaffel or the SS officers, treated Elie, the main character, and the Jewish prisoners in a dehumanizing way by taking their belongings away, giving them commands like wild dogs, and calling and tattooing them with
Jennifer sanchez Mrs. Alcala Period 6 21 February 2017 In the poem of “Auschwitz” by Charles N Whittaker uses a train to symbolize a end rhyme which evokes the train used to forcibly transport people to extermination camps in the holocaust. For example, when the evidence states,” that the terror in the eyes of all the young ones to go”. This evidence reveals, on how the fear and desperation of all the prisoners trying to give tattoos to the holocaust prisoners.
Elie Wiesel’s touching memoir, Night, shares intimate details about the cruelty of World War Two concentration camps and the horrors that occurred within them. Concentration camps were spread throughout Germany and Poland from 1933-1945 as the result of strong anti-Semitic views radiating from the President and Chancellor of Germany, Adolf Hitler. In the memoir, Night, Wiesel shares of the time that he and his father endured being held captive in several concentration camps, and the battle to escape death, day after day. In the memoir, the significance of night was used throughout the piece to draw connections and emotions from the reader. In Night, night was used both literally and symbolically to portray the unknown, pain, and the end of a journey.
An inmate says, “ ‘We can't let them kill us like that, like cattle in the slaughterhouse ‘ “(31). Being killed like cattle isn't human. Being thrown into the crematoria alive, being burned and turned into ashes isn't human. The Jews are being treated like animals, making them feel worthless.
In 'Death of Schillinger, ' Tadeusz Borowski uses factual writing, characterization, and dramatic irony to engage readers in questioning the conflicting versions of ethics and perspectives during the Holocaust. In using 'ethics,' I mean "a system or set of moral principles" (OED). By using 'perspectives,' I mean to "regard or interpret something as being either much less or much more significant than it actually is" (OED). Throughout the Holocaust, there have been differing views between the prisoners of concentration camps and the Nazi soldiers. In Death of Schillinger, Borowski goes into this differing view by providing two perspectives of a situation from the soldiers' and the prisoner's perspectives.
In Night one of the ways that the Jews were dehumanized was by abuse. There were beatings, “I never felt anything except the lashes of the whip... Only the first really hurt.” (Wiesel, 57) “They were forced to dig huge trenches. When they had finished their work, the men from the Gestapo began theirs.
It’s difficult to imagine the way humans brutally humiliate other humans based on their faith, looks, or mentality but somehow it happens. On the novel “Night” by Elie Wiesel, he gives the reader a tour of World War Two through his own eyes , from the start of the ghettos all the way through the liberation of the prisoners of the concentration camps. This book has several themes that develop throughout its pages. There are three themes that outstand from all the rest, these themes are brutality, humiliation, and faith. They’re the three that give sense to the reading.
In the novel night, Elie Wiesel discusses how the Nazi army dehumanizes the Jews. In the beginning, Moishe the Beadle came back and told them that “Infants were tossed into the air and used as targets for the machine guns” (6). The army took those lives of innocent babies, that one day could have been something. They treated the babies like they were clay targets.
Night has revealed to me the immensity of the suffering and ruthlessness that Jews were subjected to on daily basis during the holocaust in an emotional and moving first-hand experience. I choose a train, symbol of oppression, to represent the initial separation from a normal life in which everyone inside the crowded train car received, along with a taste of the pain and suffering that was soon to be forced upon them. I choose this quote to show how shocking mentally and physically the transition phase was from a normal life to that of the oppressed and to emphasize how easily he gave up in the beginning. Despite this, he managed to persevere and overcome the enormous challenges of surviving in a concentration camp.
The human condition is a very malleable idea that is constantly changing due to the current state of mankind. In the memoir Night by Elie Wiesel, the concept of the human condition is displayed in the worst sense of the concept, during the Holocaust of WWII. During this time, multiple groups of people, most notably European Jews, were persecuted against and sent to horrible hard labor and killing centers such as Auschwitz. In this memoir, Wiesel uses complex figurative language such as similes and metaphors to display the theme that a person’s state as a human, both at a physical and emotional level, can be altered to extreme lengths, and even taken away from them, under the most extreme conditions.
Imagine waking up to a pungent odor and thousands of grim, lifeless faces. Imagine losing friends one by one, then eventually even family members. Merciless Nazis surrounding the camp, making escape impossible. The only thing one can do is to hope and to be courageous. Courage is a dear friend; fear, however, is a vicious enemy.
Elie Wiesel, author and victim of the Holocaust wrote the novel Night which portrays his experiences in the Holocaust. During the Holocaust the Nazis dehumanized many groups of people, but primarily the Jewish people. Elie writes about his personal journey through the Holocaust, and how he narrowly escaped death. In Elie’s novel he also provides detailed descriptions of what the victims of the Holocaust had to suffer through, and the different ways the Nazis made them feel like nothing more than animals that are meant to be used for work and slaughtered. One of the first things that Elie and the other Jewish people from his village have to suffer through is riding in a cramped cattle car, as if they were animals.
When placed in particular situations, humans rank which cultural or personal values they found the most essential. Consequently, certain ideals are not considered. During the infamous incident known as the Holocaust, this occurred frequently. As a result, the people that underwent these horrible situations nominated particular personal or cultural values over others. This selection determined the difference between life and death for several individuals.
The violence is graphic and brutal, with shots lingering on the dead and on the unthinkable acts performed by the Nazis liquidating the Ghetto. The moments that stick out as the most brutal in both works include the image of infants being tossed into a flaming ditch in Night (32), and the mountain of dead Jews in Schindler’s List . Both of these moments encapsulate the toll of the Holocaust, with Night showing the death of a symbol of innocence, and Schindler’s List showing the sheer amount of dead. Once inside the