Here in Our Auschwitz, and Other Stories

By: Tadeusz Borowski

Narrated by: Stefan Rudnicki

The most complete English-language collection of the prose of Tadeusz Borowski, the most challenging chronicler of Auschwitz, with a foreword by Timothy Snyder, author of On Tyranny.

In 1943, the 20-year-old Polish poet Tadeusz Borowski was arrested and deported to Auschwitz as a political prisoner. What he experienced in the camp left him convinced that no one who survived Auschwitz was innocent.

All were complicit; the camp regime depended on this. Borowski’s tales present the horrors of the camp as reflections of basic human nature and impulse, stripped of the artificial boundaries of culture and custom. Inside the camp, the strongest of the prisoners form uneasy alliances with their captors and one another, watching unflinchingly as the weak scrabble and struggle against their inevitable fate. In the last analysis, suffering is never ennobling and goodness is tantamount to suicide.

Bringing together for the first time in English Borowski’s major writings and many previously uncollected works, this is the most complete collection of stories in a new, authoritative translation, with a substantial foreword by Timothy Snyder that speaks to its enduring relevance.

©2021 Yale University Press. Foreword © 2021 by Timothy Snyder (P)2022 Blackstone Publishing

A Genuine Treasure

Tadeusz Borowski was tumultuous and brutal. He died far too young after having survived unimaginable horror in Auschwitz and other atrocities. No doubt the trauma he carried was too much to handle. But in “Here in our Auschwitz and Other Stories” we have more of him here captured in his short stories and poetry.

“Ladies and Gentlemen Welcome to the Gas” is in a class of its own. It’s here combined with other exceptional works detailing the brutal humanity of camp and ghetto life. Beauty abc horror, man’s utter inhumanity to man. This should all be required reading, especially today. Stefan Rudnicki is the perfect narrator for this work. The best of the best!!