[et_pb_section admin_label=”section”][et_pb_row admin_label=”row”][et_pb_column type=”4_4″][et_pb_text admin_label=”Text” background_layout=”light” text_orientation=”left”]<\/p>\n
[\/et_pb_text][\/et_pb_column][\/et_pb_row][et_pb_row admin_label=”row”][et_pb_column type=”1_4″][et_pb_image admin_label=”Image” src=”https:\/\/pascaleditions.com\/colintrafford\/wp-content\/uploads\/borowski-review.jpg” show_in_lightbox=”off” url_new_window=”off” animation=”left” sticky=”off”] [\/et_pb_image][\/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=”1_2″][et_pb_text admin_label=”Text” background_layout=”light” text_orientation=”left” use_border_color=”off” border_color=”#ffffff” border_style=”solid”]<\/p>\n
I sometimes think the only science fiction of any real value is social science fiction. \u00a0Where, after all, is the SF technology of yesteryear, the hover cars, the light sabres, the photon torpedos? \u00a0Where are the galactic empires, the landing tentacled Martians? All that may be a welcome and entertaining\u00a0escape from the here and now, but here and now is where we are. \u00a0How do we deal with it — transform it? \u00a0 Social science fiction, by presenting\u00a0images of feasible alternative societies, offers us not escapism but\u00a0up the possibility of real<\/em> escape. That is why it is dangerous. \u00a0And, as a rule, unpopular.<\/p>\n Needless to say, in American publishing and book marketing, to be unpopular is the kiss of death. \u00a0Books are there to shore up<\/em> the way we think now, not to disturb — aside from the brain-numbing mandatory “subversion” of political correctness — or suggest alternative views. \u00a0Most science fiction tries to have it both ways through the adroit use of metaphor. \u00a0Worried about immigration? \u00a0Watch Perry Rhodan blast away alien interlopers, or do it yourself on your Playstation, and be consoled! \u00a0There is not, there cannot<\/em> be, anything genuinely<\/em> different or disturbing about these\u00a0metaphorical worlds. They simply wouldn’t sell.<\/p>\n So\u00a0where do you go if you want to experience truly alien stances? \u00a0Not to fictions of the future but to memoirs from the past. \u00a0Only there will you find states of mind and angles of perception that give the\u00a0flavor<\/em> of science fiction: flavors not of the shallow overt world of extrapolated technology, but of the inner world of alien preferences and perspectives.<\/p>\n Case in point? \u00a0Tadeusz Borowski. \u00a0The literature of the Holocaust now fills entire libraries, yet the framework of that literature grows ever more\u00a0simplistic: 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. \u00a0So 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?<\/p>\n It is said, perhaps inaccurately, that the future author of\u00a0Farewell To Maria\u00a0<\/i>(renamed\u00a0This Way To The Gas, Ladies And Gentleman<\/i>\u00a0by the savvy marketing department of a literary publishing house) willfully placed himself in the hands of the Nazis. \u00a0He wanted to follow his previously arrested sweetheart Maria into incarceration. \u00a0His wish was granted. The lovers found separate residence at Auschwitz. Horror soon piled upon horror piled upon horror. \u00a0Nonetheless both Borowski (Ukranian by birth and earlier arrested by Stalin) and Maria survived, and married. \u00a0But the happy ending was spoilt by Borowski\u2019s taking his own life a few years later, three days after the birth of their child.\u00a0 He was 28.<\/p>\n 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:\u00a0 they have the raw impact of reportage, not fiction, and their power stems from the tacit recognition that they are barely fictionalized autobiography \u00a0\u2013 though \u2018travel literature\u2019 might be be a more appropriate category, were Hell a popular port of call. \u00a0For here truly one reads the chronicles an alien world. The planet on which he\u00a0reports is a blank platform on which\u00a0humans are objects, a lunar landscape in which compassion, empathy, hope are non-existent.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 No, here the residents are stick figures of the spirit,\u00a0less than\u00a0cattle in a slaughterhouse: \u00a0for in Borowski, the horror is not external but internal: the kingdom of Auschwitz is within you.<\/p>\n How so? \u00a0Because we too make uses of the victims.\u00a0 At one time prisoners in the camps were said to have been turned to more prosaic uses, such as bars of soap and lampshades. \u00a0But contemporary usage makes use of them sometimes for political ends, sometimes for subtler, more psychological ends.\u00a0 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. \u00a0 We experience anew our safety, our superiority — the joy of pity.<\/p>\n In most cases, that is. \u00a0Borowski does not grant us these indulgences:\u00a0 he portrays persecutions and betrayals\u00a0among<\/i>\u00a0the prisoners. He present us not the prisoner as victim, but the prisoner as collaborator, as\u00a0kapo<\/i>.\u00a0 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:<\/p>\n \u2026the 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 \u201cMoslems\u201d [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.<\/i><\/p>\n Borowski\u2019s narrative describes the corrosive mechanics of survival: one endured by attaining privileged positions within the camp \u2014 that is to say, by doing the distasteful work even Nazis disdained, the callous, selfish labor of inmate destroying inmate, prisoner cannibalizing prisoner.\u00a0 There is no heroic resistance here, only the Hobbesian \u201cwar of all against all,\u201d a war stripped of any and all\u00a0 pretensions to justice or glory or morality. The victims of the camps Borowski portrays are not victims<\/em>, but operators: \u00a0the very cogs that keep the whole mechanism in operation.<\/p>\n The charnel house of Borowski is quite non-denominational, a presentation that\u00a0grates against\u00a0the preferred Judeocentric reading which holds that, to paraphrase Milton, it\u00a0is better to star in Hell than serve as understudy. \u00a0This book is not for Judeophiles, or those who regard the Holocaust as the one unquestionable encounter of pure good versus\u00a0pure 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\u2019s 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 \u201cMama! Mama!\u201d\u00a0 \u201cPick up your child, woman!\u201d shouts a guard.\u00a0 But, records Borowski, she \u201cis young, healthy, good looking, she wants to live.\u201d\u00a0 And so she answers, \u201cIt\u2019s not mine, sir, not mine!\u201d<\/p>\n We don\u2019t want\u00a0to hear this.\u00a0<\/em> We want the Hollywood Holocaust of\u00a0Schindler\u2019s List, <\/i>\u00a0moral 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\u00a0justice is finally served. Borowski will not allow us such consoling narratives. \u00a0To him there is no heroic endurance or redemptive meaning to be found in Auschwitz; there is nothing<\/em>, 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.<\/p>\n Yet is that bleak recognition the ultimate<\/em> message of Borowski? \u00a0 I think not. \u00a0True, 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. \u00a0But neither do we leave\u00a0his world with unalloyed nihilism.\u00a0 Borowski died, yes, and died at his own hand, but must we take his last act as his last word, as his considered judgment?<\/p>\n Borowski left no testament. \u00a0May we not unreasonably give him the benefit of the doubt — view his death as a brief though disastrous tantrum, a momentary\u00a0weakness\u00a0of the heart, not the mind? Trauma does not leave stable victims; it leaves instability,\u00a0fluctuation.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Borowski would not be the first to take his life in a moment of fragility.<\/p>\n But a moment should not eclipse long, creative, constructive years of\u00a0commitment. \u00a0Borowski 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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n Much is made of the fact that prior to Borowski\u2019s suicide, a friend of his was arrested by the Communists and tortured; the author\u2019s death is invariably ascribed to a purported disillusionment with Soviet means and ends.\u00a0 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. \u00a0Did he really take his life because he was astonished to learn in 1951 that Soviet rule was not nice?<\/em>\u00a0 \u00a0If so, he\u00a0left 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.<\/p>\n No halo of moral glory surrounds the victims of Auschwitz as Borowski draws them, just as none\u00a0surrounds their executioners: \u00a0they were, all to often, one. \u00a0But 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\u2019s choice expressed a different reaction to his experiences of Auschwitz than Cold War critics drew:\u00a0 not a lesson of victimhood and weakness but of reconstruction and strength.<\/p>\n And what has this to do with social science fiction? \u00a0It may remind\u00a0writers of that fictional genre that the genre is not always fiction; that we\u00a0may\u00a0learn more by looking backwards than forwards; that the truly alien landscapes are in the heart not the skies.<\/p>\n But, perhaps above all, it may remind us that it is precisely on such black ground that the will to utopia<\/em> emerges. Yes, \u201cIn the end,\u201d as Stalin said, \u201cthe only victor is death.\u201d \u00a0But there is some\u00a0victory to be found in the fact that Auschwitz passed away no less than Borowski, and years before Borowski; and that if Auschwitz\u00a0was not was torn down not from within, nor from above, but from outside,\u00a0it was<\/em> torn down; that in the end Borowski stood on the side of the liberators.<\/p>\n [\/et_pb_text][\/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=”1_4″][et_pb_contact_form admin_label=”Contact Form” captcha=”off” email=”cwtrafford@gmail.com” title=”Email Colin”] [\/et_pb_contact_form][\/et_pb_column][\/et_pb_row][\/et_pb_section]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This Way To The Gas, Ladies And Gentlemen I sometimes think the only science fiction of any real value is social science fiction. \u00a0Where, after all, is the SF technology of yesteryear, the hover cars, the light sabres, the photon torpedos? \u00a0Where are the galactic empires, the landing tentacled Martians? All that may be a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"on","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"class_list":["post-188","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"yoast_head":"\n