This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen

Tadeusz Borowski · 1922–1951 · Poland

Originally This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen (Polish)

Why it matters

A prisoner-functionary narrates the daily machinery of Auschwitz from inside his own complicity in it. Testimony stripped of all consoling moral distance, including the reader's comfortable sense of innocence.

At a glance

Flat, deliberately unsentimental prose whose difficulty is moral rather than syntactic.