This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen

This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen is a collection of short stories by Tadeusz Borowski, inspired by the author's experience in Nazi concentration camps. The original Polish title was Pożegnanie z Marią (Farewell to Maria). Borowski, who was not Jewish but was held as a political prisoner, was arrested by the Gestapo in 1942 after falling into a trap set for his fiancée, a member of the Polish resistance in Warsaw. He spent about two years at Auschwitz and, as the Soviet Army advanced, was sent on a death march to Dachau, from which the U.S. Seventh Army liberated him in the spring of 1945.

The stories were written in the following years in Stalinist Poland. They are linked by their themes and by the character Tadek, who narrates and serves as the book's focal point. The narration is largely autobiographical, though Tadek is a condensed version of the author rather than the same person: he is a hardened survivor, while those who knew Borowski remembered him as a generous man who helped others without regard for himself. The prose is cold, searing and bitterly satirical, and it lays bare the poisonous relationships among the prisoners themselves.

Borowski takes a behavioural approach: he describes what characters do and how they outwardly react, without delving into their inner feelings or offering obvious moral judgement. The expanded edition includes five further stories, added with the author's permission. The English translation appeared in 1959, and the book later joined Penguin's "Writers from the Other Europe" series, edited by Philip Roth, which helped establish it as a key work of Holocaust literature.