This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen [antikvár]

Introduction Tadeusz Borowski opened a gas valve on July i, 1951. He was not yet thirty. Borowski's suicide was a shock that one can compare only to the suicide, twenty-one years before, of Vladimir Mayakovski. Borowski was the greatest hope of Polish literature among the generation of his contemporaries decimated by the war. He was also the greatest hope of the Communist party, as well as its apostle and inquisitor; many years had to pass before many of us realized that he was also its martyr. The five-volume posthumous edition of his collected works contains poetry, journalistic writings, news articles, novels, and short stories; among the latter are at least a hundred pages published by a boy of twenty-four one year after his release from the concentration camps at Dachau and Auschwitz, pages that—as was written after Borowski's death—"will very likely last as long as Polish literature exists." Borowski's Auschwitz stories, however, are not only a masterpiece of Polish—and of world—literature. Among the tens of thousands of pages written about the holocaust and the death camps, Borowski's slender book continues 11