This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen

By: Tadeusz Borowski, Barbara Vedder - translator, Michael Kandel - translator

Narrated by: Roy McCrerey

Length: 6 hrs and 1 min

Publisher's summary

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.

For more than 70 years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Learners trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

©1959, 1967, 1976 Maria Borwoski, Penguin Books Ltd, Jan Kott (P)2021 Upfront Books

REQUIRED Reading

There are no words for how astounding this work is in its breadth. The way Tadeusz Borowski tells the story is so matter of fact that it leaves the reader shocked. But it's a bolt that is needed. It's real, visceral. It's human beings at their most primitive, just trying to survive. And knowing the horror of Borowski's life in general, and his tragic death, it adds an even greater depth to the reading. READ THIS BOOK. This shouldn't be an option. It should be mandatory. And Roy McCrerey is a revelation.

Powerful!

I am not sure why this book does not garner more attention in literary circles. It is a remarkable account of life in Nazi prison camps.

Exceptional - there is none better

Borowski writes, for a young man, with a maturity that one can assume was arrived at through his experience with great suffering. His detailing of the experience of those in camps that were not Jewish is highly valuable if we are to understand how the tiers of genocide not only occur but are carried out. “Though his hands have passed thousands.” How does one live with oneself when they are forced to become a part of the machine that is responsible for human slavery? He did not. His suicide is perhaps the greatest testament to his small body of work.

Enjoy listening, though not for the sensitive. There are great detailings of physical torture.

-Noah Balfour