Review by yolanda (2006-08-20)
I read in Polish ‘This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen’ by Tadeusz
Borowski and it was the most powerful thing, which I ever read due to semi-documentary language and cool,‘behavioural’ descriptions, typical for Borowski’s prose.
These stories are NOT a fiction – they are an artistic literary description of Borowski’s life: his love to his future wife, Maria Rundo (and their love correspondence in Auschwitz), their imprisonment in Auschwitz-Birkenau and their separation after he was taken away to other Nazi camps – Natzweiter and Dachau.
Borowski was a survivor of forgotten Holocaust of Poles. He wasn’t a Jew, what let him to avoid the Warsaw’s Ghetto. The Germans arrested him accidentally in 1943 – when he was looking in the City for his fiancée Maria – during so-called: “Lapanka” {The Catch}, a Nazi hunting down Poles on the streets of Warsaw. In Auschwitz he found his Maria, also arrested by Germans for illegal trading…
Tadeusz Borowski – a young, left wing poet and novelist with a great talent – committed suicide after the war in age of 29, disappointed with communism in Poland.