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“Borowski’s Auschwitz — in literature and film” — Educational Session

29 May 2010, the International Center for Education about Auschwitz and the Holocaust and the State Museum Auschwitz-Birkenau in Oświęcim organized an education session entitled, “Borowski’s Auschwitz — in literature and film”. During the session, participants attended a lecture by Bartłomiej Krupa from the Adam Mickiewicz „Häftling number 119198 – Life and Work”, in which a general picture of the life and work of Tadeusz Borowski was presented, with a particular emphasis of the writer’s time in the concentration camp as well as traces of this in his prose and poetry.

Dr Piotr Forecki led a workshop “Adapting Borowski in Polish Filmography”, during which he described the film “Farewell to Maria” (1993) directed by Filip Zylber and „Landscape after the Battle” (1970) by Andrzej Wajda.

A further workshop led by Bartłomiej Krupa was “Who is Vorarbeiter Tadek?”. Participants in the session once again looked at the Borowski’s prose, through interpretative ideas of researchers and critics of his writing. They contemplated what from the work about the camps is also relavant today, especially in the context of school lessons and the attractiveness of chosen works for students.

At the end of the session, participants watched a documentary film about Tadeusz Borowski entitled, “Testament”.

Tadeusz Borowski
Born on November 12, 1922, in Żytomierz. Polish novelist, poet, and journalist - one of the main representatives of the wartime literary generation. He debuted in 1942 with a series of poems Whereever the Earth. A year later, he was arrested and deported to Auschwitz, later to Dachau among others.
He returned to Poland in 1946. He finished Polish language studies at the University of Warsaw. He published in, among others, “Nowa Kultura”. He is the author of poems collected in the volume The Names of Currents and works about the camps, Farewell to Maria and World of Stone published in 1948, in which he presented the deep crisis of traditional humanitarian values and the depravation of human beings in the Nazi system of mass murder. He tragically died 3 July 1951.