This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen

I found this book very difficult to read. Not like Joyce or Proust or Faulkner, but because – when exactly do you read this? In the evening after a good dinner? No! Well, at bedtime then? Not unless you want nightmares. I have read a few of these concentration camp memoirs, which, strangely insultin......more

This is an account of Auschwitz, in the form of a series of first person short stories, from someone who is still begrimed and drenched in its depravity. Because he wrote it so soon after his experience Borowski has managed to put little if any distance between himself and what he’s describing. The......more

Disturbing in the same way that the foreign film, "Son of Saul" was for me. It was unbearable to read more than a chapter or two at one time. The blurb on my book jacket conveys my thoughts perfectly. "...This collection of concentration camp stories shows atrocious war crimes becoming an unremarkabl......more

It is difficult, with a moat of sixty years and an intellectual barricade of countless other World War II and Holocaust-related reading, to adequately begin to review this collection of short stories from Tadeusz Borowski. Falling back into the same reiteration of virtually all Holocaust/post-war wr......more