ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I address the role of the Muselmann figure in Tadeusz Borowski’s collection of stories, This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen. It concentrates on Borowski’s use of the short story form and his dark diction, stark images, and concrete details to capture a world where time is suspended between death and life, as portrayed in the external, physical dissolving of relationships. In Borowski’s tales, this collapse of humanity and human relationship is represented in the Muselmann. In tandem with Borowski’s attention to the tight, consistent form of these stories, the figure of the Muselmann appears again and again in this collection of short stories, embodying what Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi calls “concentrationary realism.” The Muselmann is the epitome of the faceless, expressionless product of the Nazi machine during the “anti-world.” Yet, at the same time, the Muselmann figure is the visage of a person caught between life and death. In Borowski’s “This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen,” the Muselmann figures are dehumanized and depicted as insects hiding from light. In his other stories, such as “The Supper” or “A True Story,” Borowski has the narrator refer to those around him, who have almost succumbed to death, as “Muslimized” or “like a ‘Muslim,’” to capture this state of life-death in the “anti-world.”
