"I saw the death of a million people – literally, not metaphorically," wrote Polish poet and author Tadeusz Borowski in 1946, in a letter. Borowski was arrested by the Gestapo in Warsaw in 1942, shortly after publishing his debut book of poetry. Following two years in Auschwitz, he had been liberated from the Dachau concentration camp by the US Seventh Army in the spring of 1945. He published another collection in 1945 before switching to short stories, which he abandoned after 1948 to write communist propaganda. He committed suicide in 1951, aged 28.
Relatively few in number, his stories occupy a unique position in Holocaust literature and in fiction generally. In Remembering and Imagining the Holocaust, Christopher Bigsby identifies him as a link between Kafka and Beckett. Borowski called his brutal stories "a voyage to the limit of a particular experience". That experience was daily life in Auschwitz as a kapo, a non-Jewish inmate who works, schemes and exploits to survive amid daily slaughter.
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