Tadeusz Borowski (b. 1922, d. 1951) spent over two years in Nazi concentration camps, principally Auschwitz and then Dachau. After the War, he wrote a number of stories about the concentration camps, which no doubt are based largely on personal experiences. They have been collected under the jaunty, sardonic title THIS WAY FOR THE GAS, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN. The book is a unique contribution to concentration camp literature.
Borowski was not Jewish. He was imprisoned by the Nazis for his involvement in underground educational and publishing enterprises in Occupied Warsaw. He was sent to Auschwitz as a worker, essentially a slave. He and his non-Jewish comrades were put to work building and maintaining camp infrastructure and processing the hundreds of thousands of Jews from the railway ramp, where the transport trains arrived, to the gas-chambers and crematoria, to the marshes and fields where ashes and bones were dumped.
In one of the pieces in the book, the first-person narrator writes to his fiancée, who is imprisoned at Birkenau (as was Borowski's own fiancée): "I do not know whether we shall survive, but I like to think that one day we shall have the courage to tell the world the whole truth and call it by its proper name." That, of course, is what Borowski did in THIS WAY FOR THE GAS. And for him, part of the "whole truth" was the complicity and the guilt of those who, like him, survived. (The real-life coda to the book is that Borowski, just as he was gaining acclaim as one of the literary lions of post-War communist Poland, committed suicide by inhaling the gas from a gas stove.)
It is a powerful book. If one of my sons asked me to name one book to read about the concentration camps, I would tell him "If This Is a Man", by Primo Levi. If he then asked for a second book, THIS WAY FOR THE GAS would be it.
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