This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen
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| Author | Tadeusz Borowski |
|---|---|
| Original title | Pożegnanie z Marią |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Documentary |
| Publisher | Viking Penguin |
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Publication date
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1959 |
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Published in English
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1967 |
| Media type | Print (Paperback) |
| Pages | 180 |
| ISBN | |
| OCLC | 2458688 |
| 891.8/537 20 | |
| LC Class | PG7158.B613 A28 1976 |
This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, also known as Ladies and Gentlemen, to the Gas Chamber, is a collection of short stories by Tadeusz Borowski, which were inspired by the author's concentration camp experience. The original title in the Polish language was Pożegnanie z Marią (Farewell to Maria). Following two year imprisonment at Auschwitz, Borowski had been liberated from the Dachau concentration camp in the spring of 1945, and went on to write his collection in the following years in Stalinist Poland. The book, translated in 1959, was featured in the Penguin's series "Writers from the Other Europe" from the 1970s.
Borowski was arrested by the Gestapo in 1942. He was not a part of the Polish resistance movement in World War II against the Nazis in Warsaw, but his fiancée was. She was captured after falling into a trap set by the Nazis, and sent to a concentration camp. When she did not return home for the night, Borowski became worried, and started looking for her, only to end up falling in the same trap. He was caught and subsequently incarcerated at Auschwitz death camp for two years. was sent on a death march to the Dachau concentration camp ahead of the Soviet advance, and in the spring of 1945 had been liberated by the US Seventh Army.
Borowski was not Jewish, but was detained at Auschwitz and Dachau as a political prisoner. His views were therefore different from the postwar narrations of the Jewish concentration camp survivors. In a searing and shockingly satirical prose Borowski detailed what life-and-death felt like in the German concentration camps, including his revelations about the poisonous relationships between the prisoners themselves.
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