Tadeusz Borowski was a talented twenty-one-year-old poet when he was arrested as a political prisoner in Poland and, though not Jewish, was deported to Auschwitz in 1943. He emerged at the end of the Second World War to become one of the most influential writer-witnesses to the Nazi concentration camp system.

This book offers the most complete and authoritative translation of Borowski's prose fiction, including numerous stories that have never appeared in English before. These are the chilling writings of a man who has experienced horrifying brutality and sees no possibility for human redemption. Borowski believed that no one who survived at Auschwitz for any length of time was innocent, and he refused to present the suffering and brutalization of the camp inmates as ennobling. Only rarely did he permit his readers to identify a character as truly good. Alone among Holocaust witness-writers, he wrote savagely about the post-war period: his 'after-Auschwitz' stories reveal a frozen soul that can discern nothing worth celebrating in the peacetime return to 'normal' existence. Borowski's haunting works are central to Holocaust literature, and this volume at last brings to English language readers his major writings and previously uncollected stories.

Tadeusz Borowski (1922-1951), a Polish poet, short story writer, and journalist, was arrested as a political prisoner and deported to German concentration camps. He survived, but a few years later committed suicide at the age of 29. Madeline G. Levine is Kenan Professor of Slavic Literatures, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. She is a distinguished translator of Polish belles lettres, including works by Czeslaw Milosz and Ida Fink.

"Tadeusz Borowski joins the company of such artists as Elie Wiesel and Andre Schwarz-Bart. Like them, he paints a picture of the horror and madness that ruled the concentration camps, so brilliantly that the immediacy of the experience is almost too much to bear." -New York Times Book Review