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Chapter Six Things, Touch, and Detachment in Auschwitz . . . we fancy we can touch objects; nothing coming in between us and them. —Aristotle The image of a homeless man carrying his earthly belongings in a bundle is a common feature of our urban experience. No one pays much attention to the fact that such bundles consist of damaged items that can no longer be put to use. If broken objects are not given to consumption, if their Heideggerian equipmentality is denied, what sort of connection still makes them essential for their owners? Why, in one of Tadeusz Borowski’s short stories on Auschwitz, does a prisoner on his way to the gas chamber not want to give away either a parcel of food or his boots, his only remaining possessions? What is the nature of people’s attachment to objects in a bare bio-political life? In Search of the Law Following Elie Wiesel’s wisdom, I am not looking for definite answers to these questions, but rather for their more complex articulation in Tadeusz Borowski’s writings.1 Borowski (1922–1951), as a young poet whose two volumes of poetry were published underground during World War II, spent more than two years in Auschwitz and Dachau, separated by barbed-wire fences and guards from his Polish-Jewish fiancée; both survived and were married. He managed to stay in touch with her via correspondence, smuggled by other inmates. Throughout those years in the camps, despite the dangers of precarium, he managed to compose and preserve his poetry in a variety of conduits: as published,2 written down, memorized,3 performed orally, and circulated, first, within the circle of a few trusted inmates and, later, within a wider audience of Auschwitz prisoners, among whom he gained considerable name recognition as a poet and story teller. Borowski risked composing his poetry everywhere, usually keeping the manu- Things, Touch, and Detachment in Auschwitz 113 scripts under the mattress of his bunk bed and resisting precarium under the worst circumstances imaginable. For example, “Do towarzysza wiëœnia” (To the Comrade Inmate) was written in the notorious Pawiak prison in Warsaw.4 Precarium conditioned the ultimate fate of his poems written prior to his imprisonment , since his entire unpublished archive was burned during the Warsaw uprising. In 2001, these trials and tribulations took an unexpectedly positive turn, when more than one hundred poems were found, among which thirty-two had not been previously known.5 After the war, Borowski shifted gradually to prose.6 His spectacular reappearance in the postwar Polish literary stage, his alliance and subsequent disenchantment with communist ideology, and his complicated personal life were cut short on July 1, 1951, when Borowski reached the point of no return on his own terms and gassed himself using the kitchen stove. His camp output resembles a nonfictional narrative and is remarkably uncensored . Unlike the majority of postwar testimonies, it delivers a disturbingly honest message. On account of this candidness, he caused a debate among indignant Polish critics and survivors, who accused him of immoral and nihilistic leanings. Even today, an interpretative attempt to demonstrate Borowski’s less “cynical” side is, from the outset, entangled in this longstanding critical controversy, in which his writings are considered offensive and scandalous.7 Indeed, Borowski refused to identify himself with the martyrdom stamp imprinted onto numerous camp memoirs published after the war that represent a sentimental, heroic and, in a word, more digestible version of survival in Auschwitz. The possibility of distilling a value system already confounds the standard account of Borowski’s Holocaust writings. For this reason, such a reading does not tolerate scholars interested in retrieving uncomplicated moral lessons. I invoke the ethical dimension of Borowski’s vision here, mainly because it informs an intrinsic part of the writer’s construction of objects, which in turn is directly related to the process of constitution by and of an Auschwitz prisoner’s identity. In the traditional vein of Borowski studies, as codified by the Polish scholars Tadeusz Drewnowski and Andrzej Werner, the discourse of dehumanization and reification figures so prominently that it effectively subordinates all other possible interpretations. According to these critics, Borowski’s moral mission is founded upon his telling the uncomfortable and unadorned truth about how the inmates’ need to survive at all costs resulted in their adherence to a simplified, social Darwinian code in which only the strongest survived. Paradoxically , this was what cemented their negative community, a community marked by radical separation and...

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