“Gray Men”: reading the stories of Tadeusz Borowski from the perspective of Primo Levi

Abstract

This article presents short stories by Polish writer Tadeusz Borowski. He was part of the generation born in the 1920s, known as Colombo, formed in a humanist spirit that hopefully emulated a Poland that had just regained its Independence. This idealism clashes with the Age of Camps. Borowski was a survivor of Auschwitz and his short stories are inscribed in this abyss. In them, the writer creates a shuffling game that mixes his experiences and the first-person voices of the narrators. To read them, we turn to Primo Levi, also a survivor. In The Drowned and the Survivors, the writer sees three kinds of witnesses to the Lager: the “anomalous” witness (the survivors), the integral witnesses (of complete impossibility) and the historian-witness (the political prisoners). Tadeusz is a representative of the latter. In addition, Levi proposes a place of indistinction and destruction of the human, the “gray zone”, where the men of the tales rage.