Witness and form

Abstract

Tadeusz Borowski is known to international audiences primarily as an author of stories about Auschwitz. Yet even before he was arrested and sent to the concentration camp, he had already been recognized in Poland as one of the most important poets of the so-called war generation. After the liberation, however, Borowski wrote poetry only occasionally; prose became the main form of his literary expression after Auschwitz. Though Polish- and English-speaking readers and critics are in very different positions in their access to Borowski’s literary oeuvre, their favored selections of his works are still remarkably similar. For Anglo-American critics, these three very different writers are all primarily Auschwitz survivors who wrote exceptionally effective and shocking testimonies about their time in the camp. Before Borowski’s stories became a challenge for his readers and critics, the writer himself was confronted with the task of rendering into words a reality that escaped any already known forms of linguistic description.