This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen

Nov 16, 2024 2:47 AM

Author:Tadeusz Borowski,Jan Kott,Barbara Vedder,Michael Kandel

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.

Reviews

Isherwood's account is endearingly honest... a journal not only unusually objective but in parts shockingly frank. You are left feeling you have truly got to know Christopher Isherwood... A welcome supplement to Isherwood's Diaries and provides futher insight into a major literary figure

—— Scotland on Sunday

In Lost Years Isherwood lays bare his mid-life crisis with critical self-candour, never losing his engaging manner nor his sense of humour... His diaries are the basis for all his creative work, and Lost Years is the most revealing so far

—— Harpers & Queen

Positively compulsive

—— Sunday Telegraph

Isherwood remains a curious and memorable writer... A master of translucent prose, the events and people of these years seem to be described by a narrator as perceptive as he is unobtrusive

—— The Times

A magnificent book

—— Sunday Times

Compulsively readable.

—— Michael Holroyd

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