Here in Our Auschwitz and Other Stories

Tadeusz Borowski is arguably the best-known Polish writer among English-language audiences, though his literary works are not studied in English-speaking countries as part of Polish literature. His fame is due, in large part, not to his contribution to the literature of Eastern Europe, but to the knowledge of Auschwitz and the Holocaust. Borowski's short stories are, in fact, commonly compared to the autobiographical works of Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel, and seen as important Holocaust testimonies. This also means that critics do not pay sufficient attention to the artistic features of his literary works, treating them instead as autobiographical testimonies that provide insight into the lives of Auschwitz prisoners. As such, critical thoughts on the artistic features of his works are practically non-existent; the multiple translations of his Auschwitz stories might well be the only sign that they are, in fact, literary works that may, and should, be presented in different translations.Despite that Borowski had been a prolific writer of poetry before his arrest, and, after the liberation and his return to Poland, created a substantial record of published reportages, he is known abroad primarily as the author of Auschwitz short stories. To be fair, his other works in prose are not of the same artistic quality that his stories about the camp are, and he wrote poetry only sporadically after Auschwitz. Moreover, even critics in his native Poland do not pay the same attention to his “other” works either; by contrast, critical studies of his Auschwitz related works are still being written and published to this day.Anglo-American readers became introduced to Borowski's Auschwitz stories in the 1960s. First, one of his works, “Proszę państwa do gazu” [Ladies and gentlemen, to the gas chamber],” in Jadwiga Zwolska's translation, appeared in a collection entitled Contemporary Polish Short Stories, edited by Andrzej Kijowski, and published by Polonia, a Polish publishing house whose focus was directed at international audiences. It was, however, only after the publication of Barbara Vedder's translation of a selection of Borowski's short stories, published by Viking Press in New York in 1967, that his work suddenly became very popular among Anglo-American readers—so much so that it is now available in a Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics edition. Every translation of a literary text is, in a sense, also an original interpretation, composed while reflecting on both the source text and the intended readers of the translation. Vedder's version of the short stories somehow preserved the 1960s understanding of the camp, not to mention the new translation had been long overdue for some time by then.Madeline G. Levine's new translation, which, in fact, has been similarly overdue for our contemporary era, not only renders the stories in a new form in English, but follows the order in which this collection of his works was originally published. In making this decision, the translator followed the first scholarly edition of his works, published in Poland in 2004. This also means that Levine translated the original versions of Borowski's texts, which prior to this had been extensively edited, often for political reasons, especially after the death of their author. It is thus for the first time that English-speaking readers are presented with Borowski's Auschwitz stories in accordance with the standards of publishing works of literary value. The order of the publication of his works is important not only for studies of the trajectory of his writing and studying the development of Borowski as an artist. Conveying the reality of Auschwitz was, for their author, an artistic project in which the order of the works and their placement in consecutive collections of short stories played an important role.Vedder's collection brought Borowski recognition in English-speaking countries as one of the foremost writers on the Holocaust, but This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen is, in fact, the translator's own selection of somehow randomly arranged texts. By contrast, Levine presents his works as parts of consecutive collections published under different titles in different years. Each of Borowski's collections is a separate project, with short stories placed in a specific order. Beginning with his contribution to Byliśmy w Oświęcimiu [We were in Auschwitz, 1946], a volume coauthored with Janusz Nel Siedlecki and Krystyn Olszewski and published in Munich, through stories included in his first postwar collections, Pożegnanie z Marią [Farewell to Maria, 1947] and Kamienny świat: Opowiadanie w dwudziestu obrazach [The world of stone: A narrative in twenty pictures, 1948], to his uncollected stories, written both before and after Auschwitz, the translation follows the order of the Polish editions.1 The part of the title of his second collection, A Narrative in Twenty Pictures, suggests that, for their author, each of the stories was just one picture of a larger “story,” albeit one that cannot be told in a linear fashion, but is best conveyed as a set of separate pictures. Thus, Levine's translation makes it possible to engage in the entire literary project following translatologist Peter Davis's observation that “Borowski's texts are about experiments with ways of writing, and about the education of a writer, about exploring and questioning form, genre, narrative and language.”2Levine's translation also reveals a new, more contemporary reading of the stories, allowing the reader to see Borowski's struggle to find a language that appropriately describes the realm of Auschwitz. It appears that the translator understood some of his dilemmas, though she faced additional struggles, given the differences in Polish and English linguistic expressions. It is also important to remember that English is no longer a static, national language, but—especially in recent years—has opened itself up to grammatical challenges, such as, for instance, the issue of gender identifiers. Thus, one may ask if a consistent translation of człowiek (a person or a human) as man is the best choice of translation, especially since Polish very clearly differentiates linguistically between a man and a human (or a person).Levine also understands the context of Borowski's stories, which sometimes leads to additions to the text (for example, in “Ladies and Gentlemen, Welcome to the Gas,” Levine added an explanation of the genesis of Polish thinking about Canada) or footnotes, such as when, in the translation of the second collection, The World of Stone, the translator opted for footnotes. The main difficulties, for both the translator and the readers, are related to Borowski's usage of lagersprache, the language of Auschwitz prisoners. To a large extent, this language is untranslatable into English, such as in the title of the story chosen by the editor for the book, where the author uses the locative case ending (-u) of the non-Polish word Auschwitz, playing on the way in which prisoners, in an uncanny way, tried to familiarize the name of the camp and place themselves there grammatically. In another case, Kanada as a lagersprache name of both the storage buildings of looted Jewish belongings as well as the commando name for the groups of prisoners working there, translating it as “Canada” may be disputable. Though translators are in a position to make important decisions about the text, and it would not be fair to question their solutions without a larger discussion, one would expect in this case at least a short acknowledgement of the issues the translator otherwise left unaccounted for when making linguistic choices. This is all the more reasonable expectation when taking into account that the collection is preceded by a foreword, the translator's acknowledgements, and the translator's introduction. Both in this respect, as well as the lack of any discussion on the literary aspects of Borowski's short stories, the foreword and the introduction seem to, in a large part, fail their purpose, focusing instead on the political and biographical aspects of his work.Due to copyright issues, Anglo-American readers had to wait for these new versions for quite a long time. With the influx of airport fiction with the word “Auschwitz” in the title, it is important for publishers to also have on the market prose that testifies to the authentic experiences of actual prisoners. This point might also explain the publisher's choice for the title of the collection, Here in Our Auschwitz, though Borowski did not include his only autobiographical Auschwitz story in any of his authorial collections. In the end, Borowski's stories are among the very best books about Auschwitz and the Holocaust. Levine's translation, despite some of the features that deserve a larger discussion, is excellent. It is an important addition to the available texts about the Holocaust, and will hopefully find its ways to a wider general reading public to whom Borowski can speak his truths about Auschwitz.

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