When
trying to find a definition for the word ‘living’ Dictionary.com provided me
with the most ambiguous answers such as: having life, not dead, being alive,
active or thriving, vigorous, and strong. From here I explored the term ‘alive’
this gave me the same kind of ambiguous answers including, having life, existing,
and not dead or lifeless. So in my search for an answer of what being alive
means I looked up its antonym, dead. Thus, dictionary.com gave me answers
equivalent to, no longer living, deprived of life, brain-dead, resembling
death, and deathlike. The only one of these answers that truly stuck me as a
true modern definition of living and life is the one under death that said
brain-dead. When a person is brain-dead they are unable to process information
or control their organs, they are truly ‘dead.’
These definitions discussed above
are up for debate according to dictionary sources. There is no clean cut answer
to who is alive versus who is dead like someone in our society would like to
believe. In modern society life and death are thought of like black and white
there is no person that can be both breathing but dead, but this is one of the
main focuses in both the books we have read. Can someone be both alive and
dead? In both texts, This Way for The
Gas, Ladies and Gentleman and The
Emperor of Lies explores and redefines the modern definition of living.
Through the events and characters in these texts the readers are made to
question whether just because a person’s heart is beating does not mean they
are living, especially is they have lost all sense of morals and their psyche.
In today’s society morals are what
people believe is right and wrong, and everyone’s morals are different but most
follow the same guidelines set forth in the bible. Things like: do not steal,
do not lie, honor your mother and father, treat your neighbor with respect,
remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy, do not kill, and do not commit
adultery. Each and every one of these ‘laws’ are broken in both of our texts,
leading to degradation in the person and the society as a whole. This also
leads to the person’s soul, spirit, and mind to soften and sooner or later
waste away, their psyche. Leaving a person with no morals or consequence, this
causes problems in the society they live in (the Ghetto or Camp) and the new
society they arrive in.
In Tadeusz Borowski’s This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentleman,
we enter the story with his character Tadik’s morals already lost. He shows us
this by putting the completely unimaginable with the absolutely normal. He
describes the depot station as “a cheerful little station” and explains that
“this is where they load freight for Birkenau: supplies for the construction of
the camp, and people for the gas chambers. Trucks drive around, load up lumber,
cement, people-a regular daily routine” (33-34). This passage makes the reader
stop in his/her tracks and think. Did this person really just put supplies and
gas chambers and trucks, cement, and people in the same sentence? And then call
it a regular daily routine?! Yes, Tadik did. Because he has been so
desensitized that to him is an everyday task. If this sort of thing did not
happen it would be an unordinary day and something would be wrong. He shows the
reader again just how unordinary the life he is forced to live is when he talks
about the soccer game they are playing. Tadik tells us, “between two throw-ins
in a soccer game, right behind my back, three thousand people had been put to
death (84). To us (this 254 class) these events are something that has never happened
in our lifetime so it seems so unordinary and so inhumane. Showing the
difference in morals. Showing the desensitization that has happened to Tadik.
Putting the unimaginable with the mundane shows the reader just how
unfathomable this situation is, and how his morals are gone, he has a new set
of morals, where the deceased are not a big deal.
We also get the mundane with the
completely unimaginable in Steve Sem-Sandberg’s The Emperor of Lies, he uses this technique, when he is describing
how Rosa nurtures Samstag, he talks of her picking him up just like a mother
would pick up a sleeping toddler and carry him/her to their room. But this
situation is nothing of the norm, instead we are faced with Rosa picking up
Samstag just after the Chairman has rapped Mirjam and Samstag sat outside the
door masturbating “she is able to get his loose-jointed body over her shoulder
and carry it backwards up the stairs to the dormitories above” (173). Rosa has
nothing to say to Samstag or about the events that just occurred instead she
put the child in his bed. This leads the reader to believe that this is a very
ordinary occurrence in Rosa’s world. She has lost all of her morals. She does
not see this act as wrong, and if she does she is at just as much fault as the
Chairman and as Samstag because she was a bystander. She has found it within
herself that it is okay to stand by and let children be rapped. She has lost
her soul, her psyche, but most of all she has lost herself. Just like Tadik and
everyone else in these novels have.
Near the end of the This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentleman
we find ourselves faced with a completely desensitized Tadik. We find ourselves
face to face with someone that is talking about a new way to burn children,
“we’ve figured out a new way to burn people want to hear it? I indicated polite
interest.” First of all, who in their right mind would stick around to listen
to a new way to burn people, and “indicate polite interest”? A person that has
been so desensitized of all humane and ‘normal’ morals that he is interested in
the new way of burning people. After so much time this desensitization eats
away at your soul, this is shown in Tadik’s response, “‘Congratulations’, I
said drily and with very little enthusiasm.” He still has a dry sense of right
from wrong. He knows how inhumane and icky “tak[ing] four little kids with
plenty of hair on their heads, [and] stick[ing] the heads together and
light[ing] the hair. The rest burns by itself and in no time at all” is. After
all his time in a camp this bothers him! This is what eats away at his psyche
more than anything else, knowing right from wrong and not being able to stop
the wrong. (142)
Throughout this book Tadik not only
calls into question all of human morals and civilization he also brings about
the question of truth. He constantly talks of having the “courage to tell the
world the whole truth and call it by it’s proper name” (122). This is one of
the big signs of the degradation of his mind, his soul, and his spirit. He has
found it within himself to finally admit that he does not know if he will live
through this camp, but if he does he wants to tell all of humanity just how
awful, grotesque and inhumane it can really be. He wants to share his story.
But at the same time he does not want to share the truth, because he does not
know how to cope with what he has gone through therefore how could anyone else.
He knows that because he is alive millions of others are dead. He has to live
with this. And at the end of the book we see that he cannot live with this.
“With tremendous intellectual effort I attempt to grasp the true significance
of the events, thing and people I have seen” he absolutely cannot grasp what he
has lived through and day by day it eats him alive, “I settle down by the
window, rest my head on my palms and, lulled by the sound of the dishes which
my wife is washing in the kitchen alcove, I stare at the windows of the house
across the way, where the lights and the radios are being turned off one by
one” (179-180). It’s not to my surprise that this man committed suicide. You
can see it coming, you can understand. This is what I mean by seeing how living
through this horrible event eats away at a person. Tadeusz, our author, lived
through Auschwitz, but not really. Auschwitz took his soul. Auschwitz took his
mind. Auschwitz took his life. All he was in the end was walking and
breathing. He was not even a person
anymore, because Auschwitz deprived him of his life.
This same concept is shown
throughout The Emperor of Lies; the
ghetto deprives each and every one of our characters of their lives. In the end
they are nothing but walking and breathing. In the end they are dead just like
Tadeusz was.
In the beginning of our novel the
reader is ‘let in’ on the truth of the ghetto, making our reading experience
even more depressing. The only purpose of the ghetto is to put all the Jews in
an accessible and controlled area making it easier to evacuate them little by
little. And again we are placed with the question of lies. How it begins and
when it becomes the whole extent of ones being. This concept of lying is what
tears apart everyone because “a lie always begins with denial” (25). Everyone
is denying the obvious, that eventually they will die. Everyone will do
anything and everything it takes to stay alive, and because of this they end up
losing themselves, instead of accepting the truth and dying with themselves.
Adam is one of our main characters
that will do anything and everything to keep himself and his sister alive. He
goes to all kind of extents including stealing “a real handbag”, risking his
own life and others, and killing someone (128). In the end everything backfires
on this young man, his sister is sold as a prostitute, later she is shot, and
in the end he is alone and never gets the glory of saying he was one of the
only ones to escape the ghetto. Towards the end we find Adam hiding from the
Germans having hallucinations that his sister is with him “inside her face of
glass, Lida is holding her breath, just like him” (612). Adam becomes the readers hope; up until now
we have read and had to deal with the fact that the only way out of the ghetto
is up. In the last few pages of the novel Adam lives to see the liberation but
in his desperation to finally escape the ghetto he finds that the Russians are
“shooting at him” (641).
Through Adam’s journey he loses
himself. He loses track of time and days but the most significant scene of this
whole novel is when Adam shoots the German officer. The officer in amazed that
a Jew has a pistol to begin with but Adam’s takes his breath away (literally)
when he “put a finger under the trigger and fired” (627). This event is the
final string in the devastating unraveling in his character. He explains to us
that he has seen many dead people but this is the first time he has taken part
in the taking of another person’s life and “for him, the action is still too
huge to be grasped in word or thought” he simply cannot deal with the fact that
he killed this man German or not he still killed him (634). Maybe this is the
reason for Adam’s death, we as readers do not have to see what the ghetto has
done to him as he enters into a whole new world, because we have already been
told that “anyone who saw him would have said he was a shadow of his former
self” (638). Just like Tadik in the concentration camp, Adam’s life in the
ghetto has changed and shaped his personality, and not for the better. Adam is
no longer Adam; Adam is now just a shadow, a shadow that will soon be put to
rest.
Every character in each of these
texts goes through a situation similar to Adam, Rosa, or Tadik’s. They all
loose themselves and in the end each and every one of them are the walking
dead. They died somewhere within themselves and have lost all sense of what we would
call modern civilization. It would take pages and pages to map out and talk
about each character’s demise, but the moral of both of these texts is, the
harder the circumstances a person is put under the harder it is to decide to
die with their morals and ‘themselves’ intact or lose everything about
themselves and their morals just to stay alive. In the end we as readers wish
these people would have admitted the truth and ended their own lives like
Samstag instead of having to go down the ugly paths they did. Both of these
texts tell the reader the same story, they read the same way, they both raise
the question within the reader whether it is better to die as oneself or die as
shadow of their former self.
Works
Cited
Borowski, Tadeusz. This Way for the Gas, Ladies and
Gentleman. New York: Penguin Classics, 1967. Print.
dictionary.com
Sem-Sandberg, Steve. The Emperor of Lies. New
York: Sarah Death, 2011. Print.
