Tadeusz Borowski

Born in 1922 in Zhytomyr to Polish parents caught up in the Soviet Union's early purges (his father sent to a Gulag labor camp on the White Sea Canal, his mother deported to Siberia), Borowski's family was reunited in Poland only years later through a prisoner exchange.

He studied literature clandestinely at Warsaw's underground university during the Nazi occupation and published poetry in secret; the Gestapo arrested him in 1943, and he passed through Auschwitz and then a Dachau subcamp before American troops liberated him in 1945. He turned that experience directly into This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, narrated by a prisoner-functionary complicit in the camp's daily machinery, deliberately withholding any comforting moral distance from the reader.

After the war he became, to the discomfort of many who had known him, an enthusiastic propagandist for Poland's new Communist government. Disillusionment set in within a few years, and in 1951, weeks after his daughter's birth, he killed himself by gas at twenty-eight.