The most complete English-language collection of the prose of Tadeusz
Borowski, the most challenging chronicler of Auschwitz, with a foreword
by Timothy Snyder, author of On Tyranny
"Borowski's sharp-edged descriptions of life in Nazi concentration
camps shatter the limits of even Kafka's most surreal
imaginings."--Benjamin Balint, Wall Street Journal
"The most important work of the most challenging chronicler of
Auschwitz."--Timothy Snyder, from the foreword
In 1943, the twenty-year-old Polish poet Tadeusz Borowski was arrested
and deported to Auschwitz as a political prisoner. What he experienced
in the camp left him convinced that no one who survived Auschwitz was
innocent.
All were complicit; the camp regime depended on this. Borowski's tales
present the horrors of the camp as reflections of basic human nature and
impulse, stripped of the artificial boundaries of culture and custom.
Inside the camp, the strongest of the prisoners form uneasy alliances
with their captors and one another, watching unflinchingly as the weak
scrabble and struggle against their inevitable fate. In the last
analysis, suffering is never ennobling and goodness is tantamount to
suicide.
Bringing together for the first time in English Borowski's major
writings and many previously uncollected works, this is the most
complete collection of stories in a new, authoritative translation, with
a substantial foreword by Timothy Snyder that speaks to its enduring
relevance.
