This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen

Borowski's Auschwitz stories are narrated by a prisoner who has survived by collaborating — and who knows it. The narrator's complicity is the subject; the horror is how the camp system created its own moral universe. No Holocaust writing is more corrosive. The survival is the indictment. The flatness of Borowski's prose is a survival mechanism — the same one the camp required from everyone inside it.