Tadeusz Borowski's concentration camp stories are based on his own harrowing experiences surviving Auschwitz and Dachau. In spare, brutal prose, he describes a world where the will to survive overrides compassion. Here, prisoners eat, work, and sleep just a few yards from where others are murdered. 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. In this world, the line between normality and abnormality completely vanishes.

Published in Poland after the Second World War, these stories constitute a masterwork of world literature.