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This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen

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This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen

By: Tadeusz Borowski, Barbara Vedder - translator, Michael Kandel - translator
Narrated by: Roy McCrerey
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About this listen

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.

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This book is exhausting. Not because it is wordy or poorly constructed. Quite the opposite, in fact. It is beautifully written and engaging, and the narration could not be better. It is the subject matter that will grind you down. Not that those who chose to listen to this will be unfamiliar with the horror of the concentration camps; it's the ordinariness, the everydayness of it all, that will grind you down.

Borowski was just 21 years old when he was sent to Auschwitz as a political prisoner. As a non-jew, he was put to work clearing ditches, unloading the wagons, and processing the dead. In exchange, Borowski and his work detail would be given food confiscated from those destined for the 'crem'. The book is a collection of stories drawn from his experience.

Borowski was liberated at the end of the war and eventually made his way back to Warsaw. After his friend, who also survived the camps, was imprisoned and tortured, this time by the newly installed Communist regime, he became disillusioned. He took his own life at the age of 26, just days after the birth of his daughter, by gassing himself in his oven—a final irony.

Can I recommend it? Absolutely. I would even say it is essential. The stories will stay with me for the rest of my life.


Can I recommend it? Absolutely.

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proof that stories can be told in a simple way to be absolutely devastating. The narrator reads it really well too, voices and accents used fittingly to differentiate people.

Read this after visiting Auschwitz

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a powerful listen and brilliantly read gives you something to think about and we'll told

Brillant

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I’m pretty well read on ww2.
And just came back from a trip to Auschwitz. The books very sobering and good companion to going there

Thought provoking

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What a listen, heartbreaking, personal, one of the best books on audible. What an amazing story

Phenomenal

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