This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen Essay | Critical Essay #4

This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen Critical Essay #4

In the following introduction, Kott stresses the cultural and historical importance of Borowski's Auschwitz stories.

Borowski was the greatest hope of Polish literature among the generation of his contemporaries decimated by the war.... [His] Auschwitz stories, however, are not only a masterpiece of Polish—and of world—literature. Among the tens of thousands of pages written about the holocaust and the death camps, Borowski's slender book continues to occupy, for more than a quarter century now, a place apart. The book is one of the cruelest of testimonies to what men did to men, and a pitiless verdict that anything can be done to a human being.

[Borowski's first volume of poetry], Wherever the Earth, predicted in classical cadences the extermination of mankind. Its dominant image was that of a gigantic labor camp. Already, in that first volume of poetry, there was no hope, no comfort, no pity. The last...
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