This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen

Description

Published in Poland after World War II, Tadeusz Borowski's concentration camp stories show atrocious crimes becoming an unremarkable part of a daily routine. Prisoners eat, work, sleep and fall in love a few yards from where other prisoners are systematically slaughtered. The will to survive overrides compassion, and the line between the normal and the abnormal wavers, then vanishes. At Auschwitz an athletic field and a brothel flank the crematoriums. Borowski is, himself, a concentration camp victim.

Tadeusz Borowskiwas born in the Ukraine to Polish parents and was imprisoned in Auschwitz and Dachau from 1943 to 1945. Considered a great of postwar Polish literature, he attended a boarding schoool run by Franciscan monks and then studied literature in the underground Warsaw University-during the German occupation secondary school and college were forbidden to Poles. He was arrested in April 1943 and was held in the Pawiak prison, Auschwitz, Dautmergen-Natzweiler, and finally the Dachau-Allach camp, which was liberated by the US Army in May 1945.While much of his prewar work was comprised of poetry, his subsequent works detailing life in concentration camps were written in prose. His most famous work, a series of short stories calledFarewell to Maria, was given the English title This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentleman. Borowski committed suicide in 1951, at the age of 28.