SOURCE: “Graves Everywhere,” in New York Review of Books, Vol. 23, May 27, 1976, pp. 14-15.

In the following excerpt, Ascherson offers a favorable assessment of Borowski's This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen.

Tadeusz Borowski killed himself before he was thirty, the most astonishing young writer in Poland to emerge after the war. He seems to have killed himself for several possible reasons—a love affair and its guilt, political doubts perhaps, anxiety about his writing—but, like Konwicki's anonymous narrator, he also found it hard to live. Borowski had been in Auschwitz. His stories about the world of the death camps, published shortly after the war, made him instantly and deservedly famous but also—as Jan Kott observes in his brilliant introduction to this collection [This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen]—prevented his final escape from that world. He was born in Russia; his father and...