Tadeusz Borowski and Holocaust other readings

Holocaust

The man dangled on the gallows, and suddenly the world around me was no longer the same. I felt a strange sensation in my throat as if I were choking. I could picture myself on the gallows..." What Gotfryd describes as a visceral reaction to an execution represents humanization: the ability to identify with strangers to the extent that empathy becomes shared emotions and sensations. To feel the sensation of choking while watching another person perish at the gallows means identifying so fully with that human being that there is no gap between the self and the other. All human beings are connected. All are one. Caring, empathy, sharing, and respect are part of the universal human experience. Dehumanization entails the opposite. Dehumanization therefore means detaching from humanity, becoming frozen, cold, unable to feel for the suffering endured by fellow human beings. The person who dehumanizes others has already dehumanized the self. By cutting oneself off from humanity, the individual denies that which binds human beings together. The process of dehumanization therefore begins with the dehumanization of the self.

Even Gotfryd is willing to humanize his captors, recognizing their gradual or partial detachment from the prisoners and recognizing the Nazi's occasional "respect" (real or imagined) for rebellious prisoners Gotfryd suggests that the process of dehumanization occurs gradually and incrementally. Dehumanization can occur in degrees. In "This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentleman," Tadeusz Borowski illustrates the process and the effects of dehumanization. Prisoners themselves become perpetrators; in being dehumanized they begin the process of dehumanizing others. Wishing for Nazis to die or participating in the death of Nazis are dehumanizing acts: "I should like to slaughter one or two men, just to throw off the concentration camp mentality." Becoming deadened to suffering, numb to pain, is one of the end results of being dehumanized.

Dehumanization occurs first by the dehumanizer detaching the self from the rest of humanity. The detachment depends on the creation of in-groups and out-groups. Rigid lines must be drawn between that which is human and that which is not, that which is us, and that which is them, that which is captor and that which is prisoner. Nazi ideology was based on the sharp demarcations between groups: enabling dehumanization to a degree rarely witnessed in human history.

The Jews bore by far the biggest brunt of the dehumanization policy that underwrote Nazi ideology. Borowski notes, "Aryans had stopped being sent to the gas chambers -- except for special cases. From then on only Jews were gassed en masse." Therefore, integral to the process and experience of dehumanization is the development of a cognitive schema that allows for strict demarcations between valuable and disposable human beings. Jews were categorically dismissed, dehumanized, devalued, and deemed dead.

Dehumanization also manifests in the substitution of prisoner identification numbers for names. Objects are numbered; people are named. Therefore, a numbered person is no longer a human being but an object or a piece of property. As the author of "The Girl From Auschwitz No. 74233" states plainly, "the main executioner of the camp, Tauber, came again. Girls, prisoners of long standing, tattooed numbers on our left hands. We were no longer people." The number, tattooed on skin like cattle branding, is a brutal reminder of the Nazi scourge. Dehumanization becomes etched onto the skin: forever a part of the prisoner's life.

The story of Hans Burger eerily combines the dehumanization of prisoner identification with the dehumanizing cognitive schemas that create in groups and out groups. Before getting beaten up by the guards, Burger believes himself to be in a category distinct from the other Jewish prisoners. He is German and served in World War One. He boasts about his service in the German army and shows off his Iron Cross. He proudly states his prisoner identification to the guards in an attempt to appease them. The other prisoners warn him that the Nazi captors will view him as being categorically different because he is Jewish but Burger is in denial of the extent to which Jews were being systematically, categorically dehumanized. The Jews were dehumanized to a greater degree than their fellow prisoners, differentiated by visible markings like identification badges and the tattoos.

Burger ultimately does experience the dehumanizing treatment from the SS officers. Gotfryd notes, "Several of us looked at one another in sympathy. This must have been the worst humiliation any man could endure, especially one who had thought of himself special so recently." The Hans Burger #15252 story also illustrates the thread of humanity that connected all the prisoners because of their plight. Their sympathy for Hans starkly contrasts with the ways the SS treated him: the other prisoners humanize Burger in spite of his seeming arrogance. Gotfryd notes that Burger was in fact "masquerading as a Jew" to help his fellow prisoners and never took credit for his self-sacrifice. Self-sacrifice is also the opposite of dehumanization. Self-sacrifice proves the universal bond of humanity, consciously links together disparate human beings with empathy and love-in-action.

The Nazis represent the opposite act of dehumanization. However, in This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, Borowitz describes the ways prisoners also dehumanized each other in their complicity or in their overt actions. Dehumanization creates enormous bitterness in some prisoners, and others willingly participate in the humiliation of their fellow prisoners. Even when under orders, their actions are dehumanizing. They first had to cut themselves off from their fellow prisoners like Hans Burger did; but the Canada troops went one step further in engaging in dehumanizing acts like stealing objects from prisoners. Stealing personal effects from prisoners or participating in their trafficking were some of the ways prisoners dehumanized each other in the concentration camps.

Unlike many of the Holocaust writers, Borowitz acknowledges the mechanisms by which prisoners become complicit in the process of dehumanization. That their actions are based on the threat of immanent death does not matter as much as their being unwilling to make sacrifices. If making a sacrifice is the ultimate expression of love for fellow human beings, then refusing to do so is one step towards dehumanization. Borowitz's own guilt and self-reflection proves that for some prisoners, dehumanization was not just something that happened to them but something that happened because of them. Borowitz refers to the phenomenon as "insane passivity" and writes, "Why is it that nobody cries out, nobody spits in their faces, nobody jumps at their throats." Prisoners who do not feel acutely enough for their fellow prisoners dehumanize each other. In the process of doing so they dehumanize themselves. They rediscover their humanity in death: in what Mordekhay Tairolnitsky calls a "fraternal grave" as if to emphasize the shared plight of the prisoners.

The Nazi regime dehumanized prisoners in perverse and systematic ways: herding and branding them like cattle, separating family members, starving them, forcing them to work and live in unsanitary conditions, forcing them to labor until their bodies broke, and killing them en masse and in the most brutal and inhuman ways. The prisoners were objectified, put on cargo trains. "Items," they are called. They are "sorted and marked" like any other items; they are not human beings at all. The items trucked to concentration camps became the property of the Nazi regime.

Segregating all prisoners from mainstream society dehumanized them at a basic level: signaling their physical, geographic distance from the rest of humanity. Segregating Jewish prisoners farther denigrated and dehumanized them. Prisoners were "Beset on every side / Hounded / Spat on / Slandered." Michael Hamburger's poem "Treblinka" also refers explicitly to spitting as a dehumanizing act. Hamburger also recalls the eating of grass and feces: "Eat grass, the dung, the spittle - here we saw them consumed." Burning people, torturing them: at a certain point the human spirit breaks, succumbs to the dehumanization, and thereby begins the process of dying. The act of surviving seems ludicrous: to survive to be tortured.

Mordekhay Tairolnitsky counters Borowitz's claims of an insufficient resistance movement by noting: "isolated incidents of resistance and attempts to escape from the camp were rather frequent." Survivors of the camps displayed a remarkable resilience, physical, mental, and spiritual in nature. Their acute pain, felt on many levels of their being, made their humanity all the more visceral.

Their pain was mirrored in the faces and bodies of those around them: strangers, many of whom spoke languages different from their own. Survivor literature like "This Way to the Gas Ladies and Gentlemen" is more about describing what happened to other prisoners than it is self-referential. Poems like "Auchwitz" use the first person plural to emphasize the collective consciousness that brewed among the Jewish prisoners. The narrator states, "we have arrived" and instead of depersonalizing the holocaust the poem drives home the shared humanity of all Jews. Gotfryd, in "The Last Camp" describes how prisoners whose languages and backgrounds different from his own came to his aide for reasons he knew not at the time. Only later did the author realize that their shared humanity, even more so than their shared Jewish heritage, was what gave strength and solace to prisoners of Nazi Germany.