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The Sad Case of Tadeusz Borowski

Thread ID: 12891 | Posts: 1 | Started: 2004-03-26

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Polish Noble [OP]

2004-03-26 23:11 | User Profile

[B]The Sad Case of Tadeusz Borowski [/B]

[I]By Leo Yankevich[/I]

Sometimes it’s wiser not to use statistics in poetry, since they may be based on facts gathered at the ministry of propaganda. The Polish gentile poet Tadeusz Borowski wrote a poem just after World War II, called “Night Over Birkenau”, in which he ends a stanza thusly: “the silence of three million dead”. It’s one of the best Auschwitz poems I’ve read, one that has influenced my own poems dealing with the Soviet gulags.

Although Tadeusz had been a prisoner at the camp and had miraculously survived it, after the war he allowed himself to believe the propaganda of the post-war Polish communists (90% of whom were atheistic/zionist Jews). Today experts estimate that from 800,000 to 1,500,000 people died at the camp, among them 150,000 Christian Poles.

When I first visited the camp in 1984 it was considered an undisputable truth that not 3 million, but 4 million Jews had been murdered there. In 1991, the official figure was decreased to around 1.5 million.

In other words, there are at least 2.5 million missing Jews.

I think it safe to say that from 3 to 3.5 million Jews perished in all of Europe during World War II. This probably explains why there are so many elderly holocaust survivors alive today demanding handouts from European governments. Somehow they survived.

When Tadeusz Borowski learned, the hardest way, through experience, that the Jewish Communists were worse than the Nazis, he felt guilty. He felt that his collaboration with them was tantamount to, if not worse than, what the Nazis had allegedly done to the Jews.

He took his own life by sticking his head into a gas oven in 1951, essentially the same way that the 2.5 million or so missing Jews were said to have died at Auschwitz.

[B]Night Over Birkenau[/B] [I] by Tadeusz Borowski [/I]

Night again. Again the grim sky closes circling like a vulture over the dead silence. Like a crouching beast over the camp the moon sets, pale as a corpse.

And like a shield abandoned in battle, blue Orion--lost among the stars. The transports growl in darkness and the eyes of the crematorium blaze.

It's steamy, stifling. Sleep is a stone. My breath rattles in my throat. This lead foot crushing my chest is the silence of three million dead.

Night, night without end. No dawn comes. My eyes are poisoned from sleep. Like God's judgement on the corpse of the earth, fog descends over Birkenau.

Translated from the Polish by Tadeuze Piòro