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Tadeusz Borowski _______________
Poland (1922-51)
He was hailed as a great literary figure upon his return to Poland after his release, when he published a volume of stories entitled Pozegnanie z Maria, Farewell to Maria. "Ladies and Gentlemen, to the Gas Chamber" was contained in this text. The tragic part of this story comes from knowing that the events in the story are gleaned from Borowski's own experiences in the Auschwitz and Dachau concentration camps, where he spent two years of his life from 1943 to 1945. The story describes how both prisoners and Nazis are dehumanized. While a prisoner at Auschwitz, Borowski caught pneumonia; afterwards, he was put to work as an orderly in a "hospital" where experiments were conducted upon the prisoners. Once free, with the advent of the Cold War, the Polish government convinced Borowski that a revolution would prevent "... any more horrors like Auschwitz." When the Soviet prison camps and political purges in Poland were revealed, however, he began to feel that, "... he was part of a concentration camp system and complicit with the oppressors." He took his own life on July 1, 1951, when he was twenty-nine years old. Ironically, after surviving the horrors of Auschwitz, he took his life by breathing the gas from a gas stove, essentially the same way the gas chamber victims were killed. Despite his premature death, he left an impressive number of volumes of short stories, political articles and poems. His writings have left an impact on society that will not soon be forgotten. (www-unix.oit.umass.edu)
MAJOR WORKS
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Tadeusz Borowski was born in Zytomierz, a Polish city in the then-Soviet Ukraine, on November 12, 1922. His parents were both deported as suspected dissidents when he was quite young, and he lived with his aunt; when his parents returned, they did not have much money, so he was sent to an inexpensive boarding school. He secretly attended the Warsaw University, though the Nazis forbade Polish people from attending college. The publication of his first book of poetry in 1942, Wherever the Earth, precipitated the arrest of both himself and his fiancée, Maria Rundo, in 1943; both were sent to Auschwitz.