Chapter 16 - Bearing the Unbearable

Summary

One of Borowski's most dramatic gestures was to break the prevailing taboo against representing the figure of the Muselmann, or Muslim, which stood in complete opposition to the figure of the heroic fighter persistently promoted by the Polish government. “Muselmann” was an Auschwitz term for a prisoner who, in total exhaustion and despair, withdraws into himself, losing the will to survive. As Wolfgang Sofsky puts it, “The Muselmanner are persons destroyed, devastated, shattered wrecks strung between life and death.” Jean Amery writes a similar definition in his memoir: “The so-called Mussulman, as the camp language termed the prisoner who was giving up and was given up by his comrades, no longer had room in his consciousness for the contrasts good or bad, noble or base, intellectual or unintellectual. He was a staggering corpse, a bundle of physical functions in its last convulsions.” Aldo Capri also recalls in vivid details:

I remember that while we were going down the stairs leading to the baths, they had us accompanied by a group of Musselmanner, as we later called them – mummy-men, the living dead. They made them go down the stairs with us only to show them to us, as if to say, “you'll become like them.”