The Soldier Who Wrote a Novel in a POW Camp

Polish officer and writer Tadeusz Borowski was arrested and sent to Auschwitz, where he survived by working as a medical orderly in the camp hospital. He wrote short stories on scraps of paper and in his head, memorizing passages so he could reconstruct them later. After liberation, he published 'This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen' — a collection of stories about Auschwitz that became one of the most powerful accounts of the Holocaust ever written. Tragically, in 1951, haunted by the memories and the political pressures of postwar Poland, Borowski took his own life at age 28, two years after receiving the National Literary Prize.