350
A. ALVAREZ
work had been canceled by history, Borowski was unique in beginning
with that cancellation. In one of his Auschwitz stories, "Nazis," he
remarks sardonically:
True, I could also lie, employing the age-old methods which liter–
ature has accustomed itself to using in pretending to express the
truth - but I lack the imagination.
Lacking the imagination, he avoided all the tricks of melodrama,
self–
pity and propaganda which elsewhere are the conventional literary
means of avoiding the intolerable facts of life in the camps. Instead,
he perfected a curt, icy style, as stripped of feeling as of ornament,
in which the monstrous lunacies of life
in
Auschwitz were allowed to
speak for themselves, without comment and therefore without disguise:
Between two throw-ins
in
a soccer game, right behind my back,
three thousand people had been put to death.
Following an almost idyllic, almost pastoral description of a lazy
game of football in a setting for the moment as peaceful as an
English village cricket green, the sentence explodes like a bomb.
Borowski's
art
was one of reduction; his prose and his stories are
as bare and deprived as the lives described in them. A Polish critic
has pointed out that his notion of tragedy "has nothing to do with
the classical conception based on the necessity of choice between two
systems of value. The hero of Borowski's stories is a hero
deprived
of all choice.
He finds himself in a situation without choice because
every choice is base." Because death
in
the ovens came to all, regard–
less of their innocence or their crimes, "the de-individualization of
the hero was accompanied by a
de-individtuzlization of the situation."
Borowski himself called his stories "a journey to the utmost limit of
a certain kind of morality." It is a morality created out of the
absence of all morality, a skillful, minimal yet eloquent language for
the most extreme form of what Lifton called "psychic numbing."
By reducing his prose to the facts and images of camp life and re–
fusing to intrude his own comments, Borowski also contrived to
define, as though by his omissions and silences, precisely that state
of mind in which the prisoners lived: brutal, depersonalized, rapa–
cious, deadly. Morally speaking, it is a posthumous existence, like that
of the suicide, as Pasternak described him, who "puts a full stop to
