On Borowski – Timothy Snyder in NYRB:

‘As a young man in Poland, Tadeusz Borowski had been a gifted poet. He was never not young: in 1953, at the age of twenty-nine, he gassed himself to death. The poet began writing prose in 1945, after surviving Auschwitz and Dachau. He was not his narrators, the kapos and Vorarbeiters (foremen) who share his name in the stories, but he could see the camp from a variety of perspectives. He understood other inmates, their habits and speech; and he made friends. Borowski grew up poor in provincial Soviet Ukraine and in a tough Warsaw neighborhood, generally apart from his parents, both of whom were incarcerated for long periods. He knew about camps and about the Holocaust before he was deported to Auschwitz.
Unlike most Auschwitz writers, Borowski could not see deportation as an exceptional experience. Internment in concentration camps was a kind of family tradition: the father was imprisoned in one from 1926 to 1932, the mother from 1930 to 1934, and the son from 1943 to 1945. Borowski’s first known poem, composed when he was nine, was recorded by a hand, his father’s, that had just ceased laboring in the Gulag. When Tadeusz wrote to his parents as a young man from Auschwitz, not so very many years thereafter, he relied on shorthand: “You know what I mean.” Although Borowski was not Jewish, the Holocaust was part of his coming of age in Warsaw. More Jews had lived in Poland than anywhere else, and most were dead before Auschwitz became a killing facility. Borowski’s milieu was partly Jewish, and he spent anxious nights worrying that his girlfriend, Maria Rundo, who was of Jewish origin, would be arrested by the Gestapo on her way home from the warehouse where he lived. He was sent to Auschwitz because Maria had tried to shelter someone fleeing the Warsaw ghetto.’

(…)

‘He was scornful of his own stories, disparaging them, ascribing them to imaginary authors, and eventually denouncing them. And yet they will last, as the Polish writer Jerzy Andrzejewski said, as long as Polish literature lasts. We might add, as long as the memory of the Holocaust lasts.
* Borowski’s Auschwitz is not set apart from the world; it is a natural part of the world. It is not a mechanism but a society. Rather than straining to show the abnormality of the camp, Borowski portrays it as normal. Then comes a moment, a juxtaposition, in which the normality is too thick, and the reader’s own ability to normalize is exposed.
In “The People Who Were Walking,” the selection of Jews at the ramp and their transport to the gas chamber is in the background. In the foreground is a soccer game being played by inmates. The narrator is now the goalkeeper. Fetching a ball kicked behind him and out of bounds, he sees Jews walking to the gas chambers. Then he returns to the field and plays on. Another ball goes out of bounds, and the goalie turns around again to get it. The people who were walking are gone: “Behind my back, between one corner kick and the next, they had gassed three thousand people.”’

(…)

‘In his own life, Auschwitz was a consequence of choices Borowski knowingly made. His girlfriend Maria was arrested in Warsaw while trying to help a Jewish friend, and he was caught because he followed her. Much of his poetry desired Maria; all of his prose required her. She is the imagined reader of his very first story. In “Here in Auschwitz,” he described an everyday life he knew she would understand. Unlike other imaginable readers, she knew Auschwitz as well as he. In one important sense, she knew it better: unlike Maria, Tadeusz did not have to worry about being denounced as a Jew and gassed. They both knew about the gas chambers; Tadeusz, at some risk to himself, once went to observe the selection at the ramp.
In “Ladies and Gentlemen, Welcome to the Gas,” the narrator Tadeusz is describing the plunder of the doomed at the ramp. Prisoners might rebel internally against the horror of mass extermination, but they can only direct that rage against its victims. In raising his shovel against the young mother, the prisoner is affirming the line of power in the camp, showing how it runs through him. As a veteran inmate explains to the narrator, such a reaction is “normal, foreseen, and calculated. The ramp tortures you, you revolt, and it’s easiest to unload your rage at those who are weaker. It’s even desired that you should unload it.”’

(…)

‘In 1926, when Tadeusz was three, Stanisław was arrested by the Soviet secret police for his earlier activity in the Polish Military Organization; he was sentenced to hard labor at a concentration camp in Karelia, in the far north of European Russia. Stanisław was among the 170,000 or so prisoners who labored in the bitter cold on the first grandiose project of the Gulag, the construction of a canal from the White Sea to the Baltic Sea. Some twenty-five thousand of them perished. The canal, dug shallow by sick people with primitive tools, even spoons, was of little economic significance. In 1930, Teofila in turn was arrested and deported to Siberia. Her crime was being married to Stanisław.
Tadeusz was thus separated from both of his parents at the age of seven. This was no unusual situation for Polish children in the USSR. The expectation was that such orphans of terror would assimilate to Soviet life and forget their parents’ culture. His older brother, Juliusz, was indeed sent to an orphanage, but Tadeusz was taken in by an aunt in the town of Marchlewsk. At the time, this was part of a Polish “autonomous region” where Party pedagogues created a Sovietized version of Polish culture, including egalitarian forms of address and a simplified orthography for the Polish language. As a result, Tadeusz had two years of elementary schooling in Polish and early exposure to a form of Polish communism. The Polish cultural district was dissolved in 1935, and its activists executed. By then, the Borowski family was no longer in the Soviet Union.’

(…)

‘In those weeks, Poland ceased to exist: the Wehrmacht and the Red Army rushed to meet, and Nazi and Soviet leaders discussed how to divide the spoils. According to an earlier agreement between Hitler and Stalin, the secret protocol to the Molotov–Ribbentrop pact, Warsaw was to fall on the Soviet side of the border, but the German–Soviet Treaty of Borders and Friendship of September 28 placed it in the German zone. This was perhaps, again, good luck for the Borowskis. Had the family come under Soviet rule, they would all likely have been deported to the Gulag, or worse. In 1940 and 1941, the Soviets deported about half a million Polish citizens and executed tens of thousands more.’

(…)

‘For the Nazis, Jewishness was defined by ancestry. For some people in Warsaw, it was a matter of personal choice: one could be of Jewish origin and regard oneself (and be regarded, at least in certain milieux) as Polish. Such people might disobey the German order to move to the ghetto and remain where they were—so long as they were not denounced. Maria Rundo was Jewish by Nazi reckonings, although her forebears had seen themselves as Poles for generations. The Rundo family did not go to the ghetto.
The following spring, the Wehrmacht massed in its occupied Polish territories. In June 1941, Hitler betrayed Stalin, and Germany invaded the Soviet Union. That summer, the Germans began the murder of entire Jewish communities in the newly conquered East. They killed Jews face-to-face by gunfire: more than 23,000 in Kamianets’ Podils’kyi, more than 33,000 in Kyiv, more than 28,000 in Riga. By the end of 1941, about a million Jews had been shot to death over pits. The Final Solution took shape as an extermination campaign.’

(…)

‘Later, some of Maria’s cellmates decided that she was a Jew because of the nice food packages she received from her mother. Before this could take a sinister turn, Maria was transported to Auschwitz—but as a Communist, and therefore as a Pole. Tadeusz was transported to Auschwitz at about the same time, in late April.
In their absence, Tadeusz and Maria’s friends published his love poems to her. A fragment of one reads: Will you come back to me? A wave in the dark catches legs from below, heavy sky abreast. You are like that: like my shadow beside me, as real as my body; elusive and as deep as the reflection of my unlit face in a pane already black from night’

(…)

‘Tadeusz and Maria both survived Auschwitz. Strange as it might seem, he was probably in less danger there in the late summer of 1944 than he would have been had he remained in Warsaw. The Warsaw Uprising, the struggle of the Polish Home Army against the German occupation of the city, began that August. Men and women of Tadeusz’s and Maria’s cohort, too young to have been called up in 1939, were eager to fight or felt bound by honor to do so. Many abandoned their illegal studies to die, if need be, at the barricades. The Warsaw Uprising proved to be a hecatomb for students of their generation.
In June 1944, the Red Army won a major battle in Belarus and seemed poised to sweep through Poland. German soldiers were seen in retreat through the streets of Warsaw. The Polish government-in-exile, in London, wanted to raise the flag in the capital before the Red Army arrived. Believing that the Germans would withdraw from Warsaw before the Soviet advance, the Polish government ordered an uprising for August 1. Yet the Germans managed to hold a defensive line on the Vistula River, and the Red Army halted. The insurgents fought the Germans in Warsaw for eight long weeks, while Stalin blocked American and British plans to supply the Polish fighters by air.’

(…)

‘In Borowski’s wartime poetry, all the world is a camp. In his postwar stories, characters imagine Auschwitz and the Warsaw ghetto as models for the future condition of all humanity. In “Ladies and Gentlemen, Welcome to the Gas” the narrator fantasizes about a vast concentration camp covering half of Poland, holding millions of prisoners. In “Farewell to Maria,” young people in occupied Warsaw discuss what the future holds. By that point, three hundred thousand Warsaw Jews have been murdered at Treblinka. In the story, a Jewish woman who has escaped the ghetto predicts that “there’ll be a ghetto on the Aryan side, too.” And then: “Only there will be no way out of it.” All these stories, though set in 1943, 1944, or 1945, were written after the Nazis had been defeated. Yet they offer a vision of total Nazi triumph. In “Here in Our Auschwitz,” Tadeusz asks: What will the world know about us if the Nazis are victorious? Gigantic edifices will arise, highways, factories, towering monuments. Our hands will be placed beneath every brick, the railroad ties and concrete slabs will be carried on our backs. They will slaughter our families, the sick, the old. They will slaughter the children. And no one will know about us. The poets, lawyers, philosophers, priests will drown out our voices. They will create beauty, goodness, and truth.
For Borowski, the specter of a universal Nazi victory was a special case of a general problem, one that surfaces throughout his work. Perhaps the values in which we are raised, our senses of beauty, goodness, and truth, are just an echo of earlier violence. If this is true, a writer chooses between defiance now and significance later. If he sides with power, he is inhuman; if he resists it, he is irrelevant. In “Farewell to Maria,” as Gestapo raids take place outside, and as the hours pass since Maria’s departure, her friends debate the issue. One position: what we call the classics is a record of extermination. Nothing honorable can endure, and nothing enduring can be honorable. The other: the writer should labor on despite war, because literature will survive and transcend.’

(…)

‘Zofia Kossak-Szczucka was a famous Polish Catholic novelist of an older generation who had been in Auschwitz for a few months; one of her sons died there. In Warsaw, she had founded an organization to support Jews in hiding. Borowski was nevertheless ruthless with her, reviewing her book about the camp under the heading “Alice in Wonderland.” Chroniclers who survived Auschwitz, he said, must explain how they had done so. Kossak-Szczucka had failed to do this, and so was not to be trusted.
Borowski’s view was that everyone who lived through Auschwitz bore some responsibility for its crimes. No one was exempted: not by class, nor by nationality, nor by piety, nor by artistry. And if responsibility was shared in Auschwitz, it is also shared everywhere else. Regardless of her conduct during the war, it mattered that Kossak-Szczucka had earlier expressed antisemitic views and belonged to antisemitic milieux.
An underlying issue between the writers was Polish romanticism. Were Poles ennobled by their suffering? Did they have a right to define themselves as innocent because of their wartime experience? In “Here in Our Auschwitz,” Tadeusz describes “the usual path of human thought” as “the birth of messianism amid all this destruction and death.” He wanted to break the grip of violence upon values. He wanted to cast aside the Polish writer’s traditional role as an alchemist who transforms others’ wrongs into Polish rights. The killers and the victims, the killing and the dying, should be denied metaphysical status. In stories about Auschwitz, SS men should be described as human, as should the Jews, as should the Poles, as should everyone else.
Borowski was not a nihilist, as his Catholic critics claimed; he was a moralist. He was a man of mercurial emotions, who his whole life long found equilibrium only in Auschwitz. “In the camp,” as Maria remembered, “he was psychologically mobilized, he had no black thoughts, none of the depressions he experienced both before and after. Just courage.” He imagined that in politics, as in literature, a complete renewal was possible. Destruction and death had not made Poland holy; but they had, he thought, created the possibility for a revolution. In early 1948, when he was twenty-five and just finishing “The World of Stone,” he joined the Communist Party.’

(…)

‘In January 1949, Borowski was denounced. But because his talent was deemed worth salvaging for the communist cause, he was offered the chance to earn his living as an apparatchik. He went to Berlin that June to work as a press officer for the military mission of the Polish embassy—and, it seems, as a spy. As his job required him to pass between the Soviet and American sectors of Berlin, Borowski suddenly found himself part of the greater game of the cold war and the division of Europe. While he and Maria lived in Berlin, the Soviet occupation zone of Germany became a new country, the German Democratic Republic.
And it was from there, in Berlin, that Borowski issued his Stalinist self-criticism, casting aside his Auschwitz stories: I wasn’t able to parse the camp in class terms; even as I experienced the camp, I did not really know what I was experiencing. I was playing around in narrow empiricism, in behaviorism, or whatever it’s called. I had the ambition of showing the truth, but I ended up in an objective alliance with fascist ideology.
Thus, in Hitler’s former capital, a Polish survivor of Nazi camps took a share of the blame for fascism.’

(…)

‘In 1943, in the infirmary of the women’s camp in Birkenau, Maria Rundo listened as a Jewish woman gave birth. The mother was separated from her child immediately. The infant lay in the bed long enough to get lice. When it was time for the collection of corpses from the infirmary, the baby was thrown alive into the crematorium.
In 1951, in a Warsaw hospital, Maria (then Borowska) gave birth. Her doctor was troubled that she seemed unable to sleep. She was having visions at night: “I am looking at the door the entire time and thinking: what would happen if an SS-man in a green uniform came in now and took my child away.” Tadeusz visited every day. On July 1, six days after the birth, he left the hospital in the evening, promising Maria that he would bring diapers on his next visit. She never saw him again. Their housekeeper found him the next morning, unconscious. He had apparently left the gas on. Barbiturates were found in his bloodstream. He died the following day. He was twenty-nine years old.
Those who associate Borowski with Auschwitz might be drawn by the ironic symmetry: the author of stories about the gassing of others gasses himself. Surely he meant to tell us something; surely he wanted us to know that he was killing himself from survivor’s guilt. Of course, domestic gas was a common method of committing suicide in postwar Europe; it need not have the meaning that suggests itself to us.
Borowski was a wounded man, whose great talent and frenetic activity made him hard to see, judge, or diagnose. There were perhaps revealing moments. Not long before his death, Borowski had paid a visit to Aleksander Wat, a Polish poet of Jewish origin of an older generation. Wat had abandoned communism and played the role of confessor to those doubting the Party. They were joined by the poet Stanisław Wygodzki, the survivor of the Będzin transport, now working for Polish radio. Wygodzki was distraught: a friend of his, another Auschwitz survivor, had just committed suicide in Wygodzki’s apartment. Borowski yelled at Wygodzki to pull himself together: “If we’re here now together, it’s only because there in Auschwitz we took bread from the dying.” There was more in that vein, and worse.’

(…)

‘Around the same time that Borowski was screaming at Wygodzki, he was having an affair with one of Wygodzki’s employees. Before he visited Maria in the hospital on July 1, Tadeusz had spent the afternoon with his lover, Dżennet Połtorzycka. Perhaps he was trapped between promises to two women. He had already tried to kill himself once during the affair and the pregnancy. Maria knew about Dżennet and had given him permission to leave. She needed the kind of husband he wasn’t just then.
Not being needed by Maria nullified the sense of going to Auschwitz. To follow her had been the central decision of his life. Meanwhile, their friend Mankiewicz was being interrogated and tortured, despite his time in Auschwitz—indeed, in some sense, because of his time in Auschwitz. This nullified the sense of another major decision, that of joining the Party. Borowski had not passed through Auschwitz to a new world by embracing communism.
All his decisions had once had a clear line: Maria, Auschwitz, communism. Now the clarity was fading.’

(…)

‘The ability to kill then becomes the ability to signify, and the clouds of human smoke fill our heaven. That was Borowski’s aching fear about civilization: that all we hold to be beautiful, good, and true is nothing more than an echo of earlier violence: the mocking laugh of generations.’

Read the article here.

This is one of the more beautiful articles about Borowksi I have read.

It’s a pity that Snyder doesn’t mention Miłosz, who has written rather harshly about Borowski, but also with many insights.
His verdict is wrong, nevertheless the accusation is still worth reading.

Borowski must have been of the most unsentimental moralists ever, it’s only truly unsentimental moralism that is bearable.

Borowski is still pointing the way.