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epitome of incomprehensibility
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Someone messages me on Facebook. She's in my class, but I can't put the name to a face. I do see she's been in the group chat, but why is she sending me a private message?
Its gist is this: Sorry, I know you're busy, but I missed the two classes where the prof talked about Tadeusz_Borowski. Can you give me a few sentences of summary?
So I rant to Mom, who's sitting on the couch watching Call the Midwife: "Ugh, I post some notes once for the group and now people take_advantage. What should I do?"
She is reasonable: "Well, what do you think you should do?"
On the screen is a dusty house where an intermittently dementia-addled nun is staying with some squatters. It's Christmas, see, and she thinks she has to go home for a census like Joseph did. This is the house where she was born, a mansion gone to picturesque ruin with vines creeping up the grey stone like mind-lesions.
(Now I'm giving you summaries too. It's a habit.)
I say, "Well, well, I think it'd be nice if I could. I'll see what I have in my notes."
Here is what I write. Three goddamn paragraphs. Always too much, always ADHD and extra words and typos. I can't do summery when it's winter outside.
Square brackets indicate corrections:
First the prof went over some details of Borowski's life. He was a student in Warsaw when the war started, and afterwards continued learning in a "flying university" (an underground one). He self-published a book of poems in 1940. A couple of years [later] his fiancée Maria Rundo was arrested and when he tried to find her, he was arrested too, sent to jail, and then to Auschwitz in 1943 along with Maria (they were in different sections of the camp and managed to smuggle letters back and forth). He started writing the stories in a displaced persons camp in Germany after the war. Some of them were published in 1948 in a book called Farewell to Maria (in Polish). Those were some of the stories included in the collection published in English in 1967 as This Way for the Gas (etc.) He died by suicide in 1951, disillusioned with the Polish communist govt.
So some elements were autobiographical - his experience at Auschwitz, the romance with Maria and the letters. You could call the stories autobiographical fiction, especially the first two. He writes mostly from his own perspective. E.g. in "A Day at Harmenz" one of the characters calls him Tadek, which is a nickname for Tadeusz (p. 51). Some of the stories were based on other stories from the camp that he didn't experience himself but that other people told him about. The first two storie[s] are "framed like fiction" with characters, setting, dialogue. He was probably "making some of it up," esp. the dialogue. In Poland after the war, there wasn't yet much interest in "Holocaust memoirs" but short stories were a popular genre and one that Borowski was interested in.
One more thing - the prof also compared Brasse and Borowski. He said Borowski was a "privileged" prisoner as a non-Jewish Pole and was able to receive food packages from his family (like in a regular POW camp), but not as important in the camp hierarchy as Brasse, who had a more specialized role as a photographer and whose father had German ancestry. Oh, and about the story "Auschwitz, Our Home," he said it was based on the letters Borowski wrote to his girlfriend/fiancee but the actual letters didn't survive. Borowski basically reconstructed them from memory.
...because he could not Ctrl+C Ctrl+V them. To copy-paste after ɒʃwɪts, aʊʃvɪts, or aʊʃwɪts (no velar_fricative like the first in the franchise) is barbaric.
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