SOURCE: “Stories about Terrible Things,” in Commentary, Vol. 44, No. 6, December, 1967, pp. 77-8.

In the following excerpt, Thompson offers a favorable assessment of This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen.

The Polish writer Tadeusz Borowski was twenty-one years old and had just published his first poems when the Germans put him in a concentration camp, in 1943. He survived Auschwitz and Dachau, wrote a series of stories about the German death camps which were widely acclaimed in Poland, and elsewhere in translation, and in 1951 he gassed himself. It is a marvel that a mind so delicately sensitive could be at the same time strong enough to refrain for eight years from destroying itself, eight years of knowing what Tadeusz Borowski had been forced to know.

Borowski's name will be familiar to many Commentary readers. Of this first selection of his stories published in this country,¹ translated into excellent English...