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A Farewell to Maria (Pożegnanie Z Marią)

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A Farewell to Maria (Pożegnanie Z Marią) A Farewell to Maria (Pożegnanie z Marią) Author: Tadeusz Borowski First Published: 1948 Translations: German (Die steinerne Welt, 1963; Bei uns in Auschwitz, 1982); French (Le monde de Pierre, 1964); Czech (Kamenný svět, 1966; Rozloučení s Marií, 1987); English (This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, 1967; We Were in Auschwitz, 2000); Slo- vak (Rozlúčka s Máriou, 1974); Swedish (Välkomma till gaskammaren, mina damer och herrar, 1974); Spanish (Despedida de Maria, 1977); Italian (Paesaggio dopa la batta- glia, 1988; Da questa parte, per il gas, 2009); Greek (Apo 'dō gia t' aéria, kyríes kai kýr- ioi, 1988); Russian (Proščanje s Mariej, 1989); Hebrew (Peridah mi-Maryah, 1996); and many others. Film Adaptations: Pożegnanie z Marią (A Farewell to Maria), TV adaptation, 1966; Kra- jobraz po bitwie (Landscape after the Battle), dramatic film based mainly on the short story Bitwa pod Grunwaldem (The Battle of Grunwald), 1970; Pożegnanie z Marią (A Farewell to Maria), feature film, 1993. About the Author: Tadeusz Borowski (1922–1951), born in Zhitomir (today Ukraine) into a Polish family, went to Poland in 1932 with his brother. During World War II, Borowski began his underground studies in Polish literature at the illegal Warsaw University and wrote poetry, publishing in 1942 his clandestine collection Wherever the Earth (Gdziekolwiek ziemia). In February 1943, searching for his fiancée Maria, he was ambushed by the Gestapo in her apartment, imprisoned in Pawiak prison and then sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp in April 1943 and deported later to the Daumgarten, a subcamp of Natzweiler-Struthof (1944) and Dachau (1945). After they both made their way back to Poland in 1946, he started to publish in the press. His reviews and short stories caused a lot of discussions and were heavily at- tacked by Catholic circles. He published two collections of short stories, A Farewell to Maria and The World of Stone. From 1948 Borowski began a close collaboration with the Communist regime and joined the Polish Worker’s Party, believing that communism was the only political force truly capable of preventing any future Auschwitz. As a journalist, he published numerous collections of short stories and articles supportive of the regime. On 3 July 1951 Tadeusz Borowski committed sui- cide at the age of 28. Further Important Publications: Imiona nurtu (1945, Names of the Current; poems); Byliśmy w Oświęcimiu (with Krystyn Olszewski and Janusz Nel Siedlecki, 1946. We Were in Auschwitz; short stories); Poezje (1974, Poetry); Utwory wybrane (1991, Se- lected Works); Niedyskrecje pocztowe. Korespondencja Tadeusza Borowskiego (2001, Open Access. © 2021 Bartłomej Krupa, published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 License. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110671056-040 A Farewell to Maria (Pożegnanie z Marią) 183 Postal Indiscretions: The Correspondence of Tadeusz Borowski); Pisma w czterech to- mach (2003, Writings in Four Volumes). Content and Interpretation One of the key issues is the content of this collection. Printed first in Warsaw in 1948, Farewell to Maria consists of only five short stories: Farewell to Maria, A Day at Har- menz, This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, Death of an Insurgent, and the Battle of Grunwald. Almost all of the further editions also contain short stories which were written earlier, e.g. from the collection We Were in Auschwitz published in Mu- nich in 1946 and written by Borowski (119198), Janusz Nel Siedlecki (6643) and Krys- tyn Olszewski (75817) with their concentration camp numbers on the cover. The authorship of the individual works and of foreword to this collection is not clear (Mi- kulski, 1954). Before Borowski came back from the displaced persons camp to Poland in June 1946 two of his short stories A Day at Harmenz and Transport Sosnowiec-Będ- zin further known as This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, were published in the monthly Twórczość in April 1946. The young author gained undoubted fame after a devastating, ironic review of Kossak → From the Abbys. He attacked the traditionally martyrological way of looking at camp reality, emphasising the solidarity of the victims. According to Borowski the writer’s duty is a peculiar examination of the conscience: anyone who survived in this inhuman area had to survive at the expense of others. His distinctive voice started large polemics which were continued until the late eighties (Krupa, 2018). Most of all Borowski was accused of nihilism, anti-Catholicism and Marxism. Critics very often mistakenly confused the narrator with the author (see f.e. Miłosz, 1953). From this point of view his polemics and almost all prosaic works from the short period of 1946–1948 constitute a very coherent vision of the world of the concentration camp and explore the depths of human degradation. As the writer intended, further editions also contain the short story A Boy with the Bible (Chłopiec z Biblią) and The January Offensive (Ofensywa styczniowa). It is also worth mentioning that Borowski’s second collection The World of Stone contains many other important short stories touching upon the subject of the Holocaust: A True Story (Opowiadanie z prawdziwego życia), The Death of Schillinger (Śmierć Schillin- gera), The Man with the Package (Człowiek z paczką), The Supper (Kolacja), Silence (Milczenie) or Meeting with a Child (Spotkanie z dzieckiem). The story The Death of Schillinger was inspired by the actual event in Auschwitz in October 1943. It has been adapted by several other authors, among others, Arnošt Lustig in → A Prayer for Kate- rina Horovitzova. Main Topics and Problems The main topic of Borowski’s short stories is his own vision of World War II and Nazi concentration camps, separate from the Polish martyrologic-patriotic literature. The narrative link of the prose cycle is the narrator Tadek. Autobiographical elements with 184 Entries fictional elements meet in this character to which Borowski even gives his own name, as the author takes on the main character's guilt. In the beginning Tadek is a young student from Warsaw, and later he is a prisoner of Auschwitz and other camps. He tries to survive by undertaking various auxiliary functions in the camp hospital and warehouse when Jews from the incoming transports are sent to the gas chambers (This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen). In A Day at Harmenz Tadek has a foreman’s function and becomes a privileged prisoner. Generally, the narrator who is starving, is abused and cheated, absorbes the mechanism of the camp struggle for existence as a natural reality, in which adaptation and egoism, submission to persecutors and ruth- lessness towards fellow prisoners are the conditions of survival: “Because the living are always right against the dead” (Borowski, 1991, p. 94). Through the prism of the character’s average lager consciousness, the elementary emotional reflexes and moral values of external reality like compassion, honesty, solidarity, and dignity are no longer valid in the world of the camp. In the writer’s concept, the concentration camp is drawn as a model of Fascist order, an extreme but logical consequence of the sys- tem of exploitation, conquest and terror (Werner, 1971). As the narrator of Auschwitz, Our Home is saying: “we are laying the foundations for some new, monstrous civilisa- tion” (p. 109). The violation of humanity is particularly tragic here, because the victims are also subjected to criminal purposes, forcing them not only to submissive behaviour, but also to reconcile themselves with the crimes and to participate in them (Wirth, 1965, pp. 42–51). One of the most touching scenes is from The People Who Walked On where Polish prisoners play football on the field and in the background Jews are led to the gas chambers: “between one and the other corner three thousand people were gassed behind me” (Borowski, 1991, p. 125). The title story A Farewell to Maria depicts a slightly different topic and stylistic approach (Wyka, 1948) where Borowski shows the reality of “normal life” in an occu- pied Warsaw. The action of the story is set outside of the camps but the narrator no- tices similar symptoms of complicity in the occupation reality ruled by fear, violence, deceit and an unscrupulous fight for life. The people are deprived of the right to a nor- mal existence, and suffer from hunger and cold. In order to survive, they have to cheat each other, steal, take part in price-gouging. He also trades with the ghetto. Tadeusz’s beloved Maria distributes moonshine. This black market work is the price of survival. Tadeusz deals with poetry, Maria studies in secret groups. Unfortunately, in the end, during one of the round-ups, Maria as an “aryan-Semie mischling was taken with the Jewish transport to the notorious camp by the sea, gassed in a crematorium chamber, and her body was probably turned into soap” (Borowski, 1991, p. 179). The provocative nature of the collection sharpens its strictly observed naturalistic style in a version reminiscent of American behaviourism (eg. Hemingway’s prose), and thus avoiding all of the author’s commentary and descriptions of the psyche. One exception is in Auschwitz, Our Home which is based on letters written by Borowski to his fiancée Maria Rundo. A Farewell to Maria (Pożegnanie z Marią) 185 Cited Works Borowski, T. (1991). Utwory wybrane. Wrocław: Zakład Narodowy im. Ossolińskich. Mikulski, T. (1954). Z marginesów twórczości Tadeusza Borowskiego. Pamiętnik Lit- eracki (2), pp. 585–593. Krupa, B. (2018). Spór o Borowskiego. Poznań: PTPN. Miłosz, C. (1961). The Captive Mind. New York: Vintage Books. Werner, A. (1971). Zwyczajna apokalipsa. Tadeusz Borowski i jego wizja świata obozów. Warszawa: Czytelnik. Wirth, A. (1965). Odkrycie tragizmu. In: A. Brodzka, Z. Żabicki, eds., Z problemów literatury polskiej XX wieku.
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