Polish · 1922–1951
Borowski was born in Soviet Ukraine to Polish parents; his father was sent to Karelia to build the White Sea Canal and his mother to Siberia. He finished a clandestine secondary education in occupied Warsaw, wrote poems, and was arrested in 1943 while looking for his fiancée, who had been taken. He spent two years in Auschwitz and Dachau as a non-Jewish political prisoner, working on the ramp and in the hospital. The stories he wrote afterwards are told by a narrator called Tadek who is a functionary of the camp, who unloads the transports and eats well, and who never asks the reader for sympathy. They caused an immediate scandal for refusing every consolation available. He joined the Communist Party, wrote propaganda for it, and in July 1951, three days after his daughter was born, opened a gas valve in his Warsaw flat. He was twenty-eight.