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epitome of incomprehensibility
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I bought this at a Value Village in Ontario years before it was a course's required reading. The cover showed a stern man in a helmet pointing to one side.
Based on that and the title, I thought it would be something sarcastic about car races. I approved. Things like the F1 were taken way too seriously.
But I opened up the first story, I saw it was something sarcastic about Auschwitz. This was stranger, more troubling.
After buying it, I read the title story, where the narrator - a prisoner based on the author, Tadeusz Borowski - volunteers to help with a "transport" of people coming in. It's not hard work, he hears, and you can often smuggle some food and accessories. The guards take the valuable things stolen from incoming people, but often don't bother with small stuff.
The sentence in the title is never uttered as-is, but the narrator feels a growing horror seeing the number of people selected to be killed right away - and one Nazi officer who directs them says, politely, "This way, ladies and gentleman."
...According to Norman Ravvin, who taught the Holocaust literature course, the original was called something like "The [Name of Town] Transport" and the publisher (or English translator?) thought "This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentleman" would have more impact.
(*Sort* of like fellow Pole Krzysztof Penderecki alluding to a different World War 2 horror. His 1961 orchestra piece Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima wasn't meant to be about that at first. It was originally called 8'37".)
Anyway, I read the first story, thought, "That was good, but I don't want to read any more right now," and only finished the thing three years later, when it appeared on the course list.
I was missing out on some potent images, some sharp rationality and surreal alienation. And some meandering but contained meditations, not just on trauma and survival but on love (I copied that last passage I'm thinking of in Tadeusz_Borowski).
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