— Ali Zandani
After reading many great texts throughout this course, I think “ This way to the Gas, Ladies, and Gentlemen” by Tadeusz Borowski is one the greatest texts I have ever read because of the Information It carries and the history it’s covering. This text shows how prisoners were cruelly treated in the concentration camps during the time of the Nazis. Even though this is a fictional story, it gives the reader a well-detailed depiction of how human beings can be during wars, and during times like this, good people are forced to act in an inhumane way to just survive. Besides the Nazis that were sending the Jews to the gas chambers, prisoners in these concentration camps were forced by the nazis to fulfill the same job. As Borowski being a part of those political prisoners, I think one of Borowski’s concerns when writing this story is how readers will distinguish between what the Nazis we’re doing to the Jews and what prisoners were forced to do to those Jews prisoners. With that being said, reading this text made me feel sad for the jews that were sent to their death in gas chambers and made me feel bad for those prisoners that were forced to be a part of the acts enforced against the Jewish prisoners. To add to this, I think these events in this story are so relatable to the events in the war in my country Yemen. Since the war started in Yemen in 2015, I have heard many times that the militias that are opposing Legitimate government are kidnapping and imprisoning important people for political reasons because they were opposing their acts or they spoke against them and I never believed that these kidnappings could be true until obviously reading this story. In fact, some of my family members experienced those kidnappings where they were sent underground prisons, which they were brainwashed and tortured until they changed their views on these rebellions. This text only confirms that a lot of bad things will happen during times like this and therefore many people will end up being the victims.
