Publisher's Synopsis
Dan Stone, author of The Holocaust: An Unfinished History says:
From its title alone, readers know they are faced with something unusual. Borowski was a non-Jewish inmate of Auschwitz, where he was assigned to various work details. Nothing prepares the reader for Borowski’s sparse, simple, ironic, detached, brutal prose, which recounts ‘everyday life’ in the camp – the very concept of which makes one shudder. The story ‘Auschwitz, Our Home’ ends by recounting a conversation between the author and an old friend, a Jewish member of the Sonderkommando, the ‘special squad’ assigned to work in the gas chamber and crematorium complex. Asking what’s new, he receives the reply: ‘Not much. Just gassed up a Czech transport’, followed by an explanation of the most efficient way to burn corpses. They laugh and the Sonderkommando man says that it is necessary to laugh, even in Auschwitz. The story then ends: ‘But this is a lie, a grotesque lie, like the whole camp, like the whole world.’ Borowski’s transition from the camp to the world here perhaps explains why in 1951 he gassed himself, unable to take any more.
Tadeusz Borowski’s concentration camp stories were based on his own experiences surviving Auschwitz and Dachau. In spare, brutal prose he describes a world where where the will to survive overrides compassion and prisoners eat, work and sleep a few yards from where others are murdered; where the difference between human beings is reduced to a second bowl of soup, an extra blanket or the luxury of a pair of shoes with thick soles; and where the line between normality and abnormality vanishes. Published in Poland after the Second World War, these stories constitute a masterwork of world literature.
