Tadeusz Borowski

(1922 - 1951)

Born into a poor Polish family in 1922, Tadeusz Borowski was arrested by the Nazis in 1943 while looking for his girlfriend, who had been detained while carrying his second book of poetry. He survived Auschwitz but “assuaged his survivor’s guilt by a kind of moral self-destruction,” critic Al Alvarez wrote in 1964. “Around Borowski’s stories there is a kind of moral silence, like the pause which follows a scream.” Borowski committed suicide in 1951, shortly before his thirtieth birthday. His short stories about Auschwitz, This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, were published as a collection in 1959.