I sometimes think the only science fiction of any real value is social science fiction.  Where, after all, is the SF technology of yesteryear, the hover cars, the light sabres, the photon torpedos?  Where are the galactic empires, the landing tentacled Martians? All that may be a welcome and entertaining escape from the here and now, but here and now is where we are.  How do we deal with it — transform it?   Social science fiction, by presenting images of feasible alternative societies, offers us not escapism but up the possibility of real escape. That is why it is dangerous.  And, as a rule, unpopular.

Needless to say, in American publishing and book marketing, to be unpopular is the kiss of death.  Books are there to shore up the way we think now, not to disturb — aside from the brain-numbing mandatory “subversion” of political correctness — or suggest alternative views.  Most science fiction tries to have it both ways through the adroit use of metaphor.  Worried about immigration?  Watch Perry Rhodan blast away alien interlopers, or do it yourself on your Playstation, and be consoled!  There is not, there cannot be, anything genuinely different or disturbing about these metaphorical worlds. They simply wouldn’t sell.

So where do you go if you want to experience truly alien stances?  Not to fictions of the future but to memoirs from the past.  Only there will you find states of mind and angles of perception that give the flavor of science fiction: flavors not of the shallow overt world of extrapolated technology, but of the inner world of alien preferences and perspectives.

Case in point?  Tadeusz Borowski.  The literature of the Holocaust now fills entire libraries, yet the framework of that literature grows ever more simplistic: Jews are the spotless protagonists of the whole sordid drama, Germans villains of unredeemable vileness, America the square-jawed avenging hero, and Israel the promised land.  So what to do when one of the strongest and most uncompromising books ever written about that experience is the product of a Gentile who details the moral squalor of victim as well as perpetrator, and whose response was to turn Communist?

It is said, perhaps inaccurately, that the future author of Farewell To Maria (renamed This Way To The Gas, Ladies And Gentleman by the savvy marketing department of a literary publishing house) willfully placed himself in the hands of the Nazis.  He wanted to follow his previously arrested sweetheart Maria into incarceration.  His wish was granted. The lovers found separate residence at Auschwitz. Horror soon piled upon horror piled upon horror.  Nonetheless both Borowski (Ukranian by birth and earlier arrested by Stalin) and Maria survived, and married.  But the happy ending was spoilt by Borowski’s taking his own life a few years later, three days after the birth of their child.  He was 28.

Prior to departure, Borowski wrote his connected set of short stories about Auschwitz and daily affairs therein. These brief but crushing tales are rightly regarded as some of the most powerful literature on the subject ever written, but their force is extraliterary:  they have the raw impact of reportage, not fiction, and their power stems from the tacit recognition that they are barely fictionalized autobiography  – though ‘travel literature’ might be be a more appropriate category, were Hell a popular port of call.  For here truly one reads the chronicles an alien world. The planet on which he reports is a blank platform on which humans are objects, a lunar landscape in which compassion, empathy, hope are non-existent.  Borowski is no Viktor Frankl, assiduously extracting meaning and cherishing flickers of personal nobility in the eye of the all-surrounding, all-consuming Nazi storm.  No, here the residents are stick figures of the spirit, less than cattle in a slaughterhouse:  for in Borowski, the horror is not external but internal: the kingdom of Auschwitz is within you.

How so?  Because we too make uses of the victims.  At one time prisoners in the camps were said to have been turned to more prosaic uses, such as bars of soap and lampshades.  But contemporary usage makes use of them sometimes for political ends, sometimes for subtler, more psychological ends.  The darkness of the Nazi allows us to feel, indeed wallow, in our own contrasting light; our empathy for the pathetic depths of its victims allows us the thrill of vicarious victimhood with the added bonus of being free of risk.   We experience anew our safety, our superiority — the joy of pity.

In most cases, that is.  Borowski does not grant us these indulgences:  he portrays persecutions and betrayals among the prisoners. He present us not the prisoner as victim, but the prisoner as collaborator, as kapo.  For often those who survived often did so by sacrificing others, in a survival not of the fittest but of the coarsest and cruelest. Writes Borowski:

…the reader will unfailingly ask: But how did it happen that you survived? . . . Tell, then, how you bought places in the hospital, easy posts, how you shoved the “Moslems” [prisoners who had lost the will to live] into the oven, how you bought women, men, what you did in the barracks, unloading the transports. . . . Tell about the daily life of the camp. . . . But write that you, you were the ones who did this. That a portion of the sad fame of Auschwitz belongs to you as well.

Borowski’s narrative describes the corrosive mechanics of survival: one endured by attaining privileged positions within the camp — that is to say, by doing the distasteful work even Nazis disdained, the callous, selfish labor of inmate destroying inmate, prisoner cannibalizing prisoner.  There is no heroic resistance here, only the Hobbesian “war of all against all,” a war stripped of any and all  pretensions to justice or glory or morality. The victims of the camps Borowski portrays are not victims, but operators:  the very cogs that keep the whole mechanism in operation.

The charnel house of Borowski is quite non-denominational, a presentation that grates against the preferred Judeocentric reading which holds that, to paraphrase Milton, it is better to star in Hell than serve as understudy.  This book is not for Judeophiles, or those who regard the Holocaust as the one unquestionable encounter of pure good versus pure evil even from the perspective of an age of deconstruction. Not a few Borowski readers will be startled to learn that he was not Jewish at all, that more Gentiles than Jews stuffed the Polish ovens. Jews in Borowski’s reports fail to gleam even by contrast: in one revolting anecdote, a Jewish woman at Auschwitz refuses to acknowledge her own child as it stumbles behind her, crying “Mama! Mama!”  “Pick up your child, woman!” shouts a guard.  But, records Borowski, she “is young, healthy, good looking, she wants to live.”  And so she answers, “It’s not mine, sir, not mine!”

We don’t want to hear this.  We want the Hollywood Holocaust of Schindler’s List,  moral fantasias where all the Jews are innocent and soulful and good, the Nazis black as ink, where villainy is ultimately foiled by the intrinsic nobility of virtuous Jewish resistance and the noble force of righteous gentile American arms, where justice is finally served. Borowski will not allow us such consoling narratives.  To him there is no heroic endurance or redemptive meaning to be found in Auschwitz; there is nothing, only barbarism and dehumanization, a barbarism and dehumanization to which the victims succumbed no less than the perpetrators, and willingly succumbed; a barbarism and dehumanization whose infection writhes now, and always, within ourselves.

Yet is that bleak recognition the ultimate message of Borowski?   I think not.  True, he does not allow us to romanticize the victims, he dislodges Judaism from its starring role, he frustrates the reader aching to turn the story into a tale of endurance and resistance and the standard kitsch of reunited lovers.  But neither do we leave his world with unalloyed nihilism.  Borowski died, yes, and died at his own hand, but must we take his last act as his last word, as his considered judgment?

Borowski left no testament.  May we not unreasonably give him the benefit of the doubt — view his death as a brief though disastrous tantrum, a momentary weakness of the heart, not the mind? Trauma does not leave stable victims; it leaves instability, fluctuation.  In the depths of despair, men die, just as they die in the depths of the sea, and memories and emotions can swallow a human being as completely as the ocean.  Borowski would not be the first to take his life in a moment of fragility.

But a moment should not eclipse long, creative, constructive years of commitment.  Borowski emerged from the camps not as wreckage, not as a nihilist, but as a dedicated Communist, a productive writer, a husband, an activist, a father.  It is kinder, but perhaps also truer, to see his death not as a considered dive into the depths but rather as a fatal slip on a hard and slippery trek upwards.

Much is made of the fact that prior to Borowski’s suicide, a friend of his was arrested by the Communists and tortured; the author’s death is invariably ascribed to a purported disillusionment with Soviet means and ends.  Little noted is the fact that Borowski was born under Soviet rule, and was arrested along with family at the height of the great purges in the late Thirties.  Did he really take his life because he was astonished to learn in 1951 that Soviet rule was not nice?   If so, he left no word to that effect; nor did he turn in his Party card, nor voice any protest whatever against the Communist effort to erect a living community and a new social reality on the ashes of Auschwitz.

No halo of moral glory surrounds the victims of Auschwitz as Borowski draws them, just as none surrounds their executioners:  they were, all to often, one.  But though Cold War propaganda urges us to assume his departure was a passage from mistaken political infatuation into despair, we can no less plausibly assume that in joining the Communists, Borowski’s choice expressed a different reaction to his experiences of Auschwitz than Cold War critics drew:  not a lesson of victimhood and weakness but of reconstruction and strength.

And what has this to do with social science fiction?  It may remind writers of that fictional genre that the genre is not always fiction; that we may learn more by looking backwards than forwards; that the truly alien landscapes are in the heart not the skies.

But, perhaps above all, it may remind us that it is precisely on such black ground that the will to utopia emerges. Yes, “In the end,” as Stalin said, “the only victor is death.”  But there is some victory to be found in the fact that Auschwitz passed away no less than Borowski, and years before Borowski; and that if Auschwitz was not was torn down not from within, nor from above, but from outside, it was torn down; that in the end Borowski stood on the side of the liberators.