SOURCE: A review of This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, in New Republic, Vol. 174, No. 15, April 10, 1976, p. 31.

In the following review, Pochoda discusses Borowski's narrative voice in This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen.

Penguin has followed its publication of the Czech writers Vaculik and Kundera with two more volumes in its series, “Writers from the other Europe.” This time the writers are Poles who in their vast dissimilarities indicate the impressive reach of postwar Polish literature. Borowski's stories set in the death camps of Auschwitz and Birkenau are direct enough to be mislabelled documentary while [Tadeusz] Konwicki's novel is a deliberately unapproachable fable of contemporary Polish life. To be sure the events of the war and of Polish history figure in both books, and the great differences between the two writers have a lot to do with the specific location of their narratives in...