Published in Poland after World War II, this collection of concentration camp stories shows atrocious war crimes becoming an unremarkable part of a daily routine. Prisoners eat, work, sleep, and fall in love a few yards from where other prisoners are systematically slaughtered. The will to survive overrides compassion, and the line between the normal and abnormal wavers, the vanishes.

Borowski, a concentration camp victim himself, understood what human beings will do to endure the unendurable. Together, these stories constitute a masterpiece of world literature and stand as cruel testimony to the level of inhumanity of which man is capable.

Tadeusz Borowski was born in the Ukraine in 1922. Having survived Auschwitz and Dachau, he died by his own hand in Warsaw in 1951. He was writer and poet, very famous in Poland especially because of his stories about Auschwitz.