Tadeusz Borowski’s “This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen”, was a short story written about the horrendous conditions the prisoners faced in the Auschwitz concentration camp. The author speaks of his experiences through first-person narrative, detailing the atrocities that occur in the camp as a prisoner. This short story has similar themes to Franz Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis” as the narrator in both texts relate to the theme of dehumanization. In Borowski’s narration of the life as a prisoner, there were examples of derogation of the incoming Jews such as taking away their belongings and encaging them in tight, compact trucks. Gregor in “The Metamorphosis” faces similar consequences as he himself turns into a bug and has to face the dehumanization directly by his family members.
The beginning of the short story of “This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen” stood out to me because prisoners were starving, and food was a scarcity, they were described as “pigs” that ate stale bread and whatever scraps of food they can find on the ground. This was eerily similar to “The Metamorphosis” in that Gregor’s transformation into a bug changed his appetite and his human desire for sweet milk and bread became unpalatable after his sister brought it in to feed him. These two both draw upon the theme of dehumanization because like the “pigs” described in Borowski’s text, Gregor was willing to eat rotten and food considered to be inedible for human consumption. This connection ties directly to the concept of dehumanization because the prisoners inside Auschwitz were fed like they were pests and animals, they were not fed properly relative to the S.S. soldiers in the camp. As a result, prisoners were not treated like humans, but like animals. In “The Metamorphosis”, Gregor’s sister fed him scraps such as “some cheese that Gregor had declared inedible two days before” which he happily devoured to feed his new insect appetite. Gregor literally metamorphosed into a bug and developed traits of a bug so that makes him void of being “human”.
Another connection between the two texts would be the process of dehumanization. In Borowski’s short story, the prisoners were given orders to assist in moving the incoming Jews to be transferred into the gas chambers. When the trucks came, an absurd description of an overcrowded truck with the Jews on the inside gasping for air comes to show that they were given no respect nor consideration of their wellbeing. As a result, the prisoners had to clean up the unfortunate dead bodies left over inside the truck, carrying out corpses of infants crushed and flattened by their legs “like chickens” to be thrown away. This encaging is a dehumanizing act, which can also be seen in “The Metamorphosis”. Gregor, after scaring away his family, was basically exiled and locked in his own room where the only activities he could do is eat and wait. This is a dehumanizing act because there are no human rights such as freedom, his room was locked from the outside by his own parents. The idea of dehumanization is apparent in both texts through the use of entrapment and limitation of freedoms.
