PrintEssays on Tadeusz Borowski
Edited by Marco Sonzogni
Essays by John Bertram, Dov Bing, Simone Gigliotti, Berel Lang, Giacomo Lichtner, Alicia Nitecki, Monica Tempian
Dunmore Publishing
12 April 20112
Marco Sonzogni and John Bertram, along with Venus febriculosa and Dunmore Publishing, Ltd. are pleased to announce the publication of This Way: Covering/Uncovering Tadeusz Borowski’s This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen.
This Way uses Borowski’s stories to explore the relationship between verbal and visual representations of war and genocide through analysis of the entries in an international competition for a new cover for Borowski’s book. Authors and advisors include noted authorities on Holocaust literature and Holocaust representation.
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'Hitler was a megalomaniacal artist intent on remaking the world, not only through murder on an unprecedented scale, but by destroying the ethical relationship between words and truth and images and reality. The Holocaust and Holocaust Denial were twins born in the same monstrous womb. In the twenty-first century, can we possibly recapture the Renaissance ideal that “the eye is the window of the soul”? How can we reconnect words and images to deconstruct Orwellian lies, numbing kitsch and totalitarian faux-art? Using Tadeusz Borowski’s This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen as a proof text, Venus febriculosa has challenged some of today’s finest artists to re-conceptualize the book cover as a way to reconnect words and images as a pathway to a human but horrifying truth. This Way for the Gas provides an interesting trigger for analysis and discussion on what might not be a new quest, but a challenge radically changed in the post-Holocaust era.'
-Liebe Geft, Director, Simon Wiesenthal Center Museum of Tolerance, 2011
'In Auschwitz, the concentration camp that was Hitler’s factory of death, the murdering of several thousand people each day had to be extremely well organized. The Germans chose young men from among the prisoners for various office chores, especially couriers. Their lives were prolonged for the moment, but they never knew for how long. Tadeusz Borowski was one of them, and that unusual state of being suspended between life and death he described in stories right after the war, expressing incredulity that "man could conjure up such a fate for man."No one who survived Auschwitz dared to write:“Between two throw-ins in a football game nine thousand people had been gassed.”For that honesty and truthfulness he paid with his life. Caught in the web of propaganda and put in the position of having to write lies about the communist future of Poland, he preferred to commit suicide.'
-Andrzej Wajda, 2011
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