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Synopsis:
Published in Poland after World War II, Tadeusz Borowski's concentration camp stories show atrocious crimes becoming an unremarkable part of a daily routine.
Prisoners eat, work, sleep and fall in love a few yards from where other prisoners are systematically slaughtered. The will to survive overrides compassion, and the line between the normal and the abnormal wavers, then vanishes. At Auschwitz an athletic field and a brothel flank the crematoriums. Borowski is, himself, a concentration camp victim

you will never be the same again

This is an account of a life lived in the shadows of the crematoria. There was a smell of grass from the barracks, and a stand of trees through which the streams of people in colorful clothing passed on their way to the gas chamber. There were hierarchy and custom in this new society: those without will were on the lowest rung, closest to the inevitable execution, and higher up were those with privileges, who battered and strangled under orders of the S.S. guards. Borowski lived at a time when, as Jan Kott writes: "individual human destiny seems as if shaped directly by history, becoming only a chapter in it." Borowski provided us with this, his chapter. (His destiny was suicide.)

It is a must-read.