“Crematorium Esperanto.” When I first read that phrase, decades ago, I put my thumb on the page, let the book close on my hand, lay down in the grass, and stared at the sky. I knew that I would never forget it. With the words come a scene: men awaiting a train by a ramp, some assuring others, in a pidgin of Nazi terms and Indo-European monosyllables, that the work ahead was light. Nothing to offload, just people, Jews to be selected for labor or death who will walk down the ramp and into the trucks. They will give up their belongings and their clothes. The narrator has come to assist in that selection and to take a few things for himself. That was Auschwitz in 1944, the mass murder of the Jews of Europe, as mercilessly retold in the short story “Ladies and Gentlemen, Welcome to the Gas” by Tadeusz Borowski.
In this story as in others, the narrator is a participant and shares a name with the author. As he waits for the train, a fellow prisoner buys water from an SS man on credit, to be repaid with money taken from Jews who have not yet arrived. When the train halts, a young mother, clever and pretty, separates herself from her little daughter in the hope of being selected for labor. The child runs after her, screaming “Mama!” An inmate angrily beats the woman with a shovel, then throws her into the death transport with her child.
