Tadeusz

Poľský spisovateľ Tadeusz Borowski sa narodil v roku 1922 a zomrel v roku 1951 vlastnou rukou. Talentovaný mladík deportovaný nacistami do koncentračného tábora, po vojne okiadzaný komunistami. Prežil krátky život. Dramatický. Zbierka surových, niekedy až boľavo autenticky pôsobiacich (spomienkových) poviedok začína príbehom spred uväznenia, posledná sa odohráva v hektických časoch po skončení druhej svetovej vojny. Tie medzitým sú z Auschwitzu. Začnete čítať a máte pocit, že ste sa ocitli uprostred všetkej tej hrôzy. Chce sa vám zdrhnúť – ale určite budete čítať ďalej.

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 "Borowski's sharp-edged descriptions of life in Nazi concentration camps shatter the limits of even Kafka's most surreal imaginings."-Benjamin Balint, Wall Street Journal "The most important work of the most challenging chronicler of Auschwitz."-Timothy Snyder, from the foreword In 1943, the twenty-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.

Tadeusz Borowski's concentration camp stories were based on his own experiences surviving Auschwitz and Dachau. In spare, brutal prose he describes a world where where the will to survive overrides compassion and prisoners eat, work and sleep a few yards from where others are murdered; where the difference between human beings is reduced to a second bowl of soup, an extra blanket or the luxury of a pair of shoes with thick soles; and where the line between normality and abnormality vanishes. Published in Poland after the Second World War, these stories constitute a masterwork of world literature.