This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen – Project – Ali Zandani

Tadeusz Borowski’s “This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen”, was a short story written through a first person-narrative to show how Jew and political prisoners faced chaotic and inhumane conditions in the Auschwitz concentration camp. As Tadeusz being a part of those prisoners,  he spoke about his experience as a political prisoner whose job was to unload arriving Jew prisoners and remove all their belongings from clothings to jewelry which they then sent to the crematorium. The dehumanization of the political and Jew prisoners in this short story can be compared to a similar text that I believe shares the same form of inhumane treatments received by the prisoners, “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American slave”. In Frederick Douglass narrative, Douglass narrated the mistreatment of slavery by the white people which ranged from physical to mental abuse.  

In  the short story “ This way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen”, Tadeusz describes how prisoners suffered inside the Auschwitz camp from walking around naked to shortage of food “ still have nothing to wear. But all the same, all of us walk around naked”. Not just that, the same prisoners that were stripped naked and suffered from famine were also assigned duties inside the camp. One of these duties was stripping the incoming Jewish prisoners of everything they wore and left them completely naked and later they were sent to the gas chambers. Similarly, in the short story “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American slave”, Douglass describes the hardships of being a slave and the mistreatments he has seen from the slave owners. For instance, for the first time Douglass experiences a slave owner striping and whipping his aunt Hester because she disobeyed his orders ” he took her into the kitchen, and stripped her from neck to waist, leaving her neck, shoulders, and back, entirely naked. He then told her to cross her hands”. For the slave owners it is a normal thing to do, just a routine they enjoy doing. However, for  Douglass and the other slaves, it was sort of destroying their well being even though they only watched the cruelty of slave owners. As a slave, Douglass was expected to be uneducated and ignorant of everything going around him which makes it easier for the slave owners to mistreat him in any way possible. Both texts showed how dehumanization has been used against Jewish prisoners and the American slaves in order for the rest of the world to see the inhumanity to its fullest.