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Tadeusz Borowski was born in 1922 in Zhytomir in Ukraine, then USSR. His parents became victims of the USSR spy-hunting psychosis. In 1926 his father, a bookshop owner, whose shop was nationalized by the communists, was sent to a gulag in Karelia while his mother was arrested later the same year and sent to a gulag in SiberiaSiberia ( Russian: , common English transliterations: Sibir Sibir' is a vast region of Russia and northern Kazakhstan, constituting all of northern Asia, and extending eastward from the Ural Mountains to the Pacific Ocean, and southward from the Arctic Oc, on the shores of the Yenisey river.

In 19321932 is the leap year starting on Friday. see link for calendar) Events January-February January 3 British arrest and intern Mohandas Gandhi and Vallabhbhai Patel January 8 In Britain the Archbishop of Canterbury forbids church remarriage of divorcees Jan Borowski and his brother were repatriated from the USSR to Poland thanks to the Polish Red CrossThe terms Red Cross and Red Crescent are often used as short names for the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement, or its two leading international organs, the ICRC and the IFRCS. This page is about the symbol itself, see respective articles fo and settled in Warsaw. Their father was traded for communists arrested in Poland and their mother was released in 1934. In 1940 he finished his secondary school in an underground secret learning facility and started studying at the underground Warsaw University (Polish language and literature faculty). He also became involved in underground newspapers and started to publish his poems and short novels in Droga monthly. At the same time he was working as a warehouse night guard. In this period he wrote most of his wartime poetry. He also published (clandestinely) his first tome of poetry Gdziekolwiek Ziemia (Wherever the Earth).

In 1943 he was arrested by the Germans and sent to concentration camp: first to Auschwitz, then to Natzweiler-Dautmergel , and finally to Dachau. He was forced to slave labor in extremely harsh conditions, which was later reflected in his works. He was also working on a railway ramp where all the people who were transferred directly from the trains to the gas chambers were leaving their private property. While a prisoner at Auschwitz, Borowski caught pneumonia; afterwards, he was put to work as a helper in a "hospital" where Nazi medical experiments were conducted upon the prisoners.

After the liberation in 1945 he moved for a short time to Munich, and on May 31, 1946 he returned to Poland. He found out that his wartime fiancee, with whom he was arrested in 1943 and with whom he lost any contact during his internment, has survived the camps and also returned to Poland.

He turned to prose since he believed that what he had to say could no longer be expressed in verse. The effect of his work was published as a series of short stories titled Pozegnanie z Maria (Farewell to Maria, English title This Way to the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen). He also joined the Polish Workers' Party and started work on several political sketches. Initially he believed that the communism is the only political force that was truly capable of preventing any future Auschwitz from happening. In 1950 he recieved the National Literary Prize of II Degree. However, a friend of his was tortured by the Communists soon after, and he becaome completely disillusioned. If the communists were not capable of preventing future Auschwitz's then, perhaps, they would inevitably happen again. He commited suicide by breathing the gas from a gas stove on July 1, 1951.

His books became a classic piece of Polish post-war literature and influenced much of the Central European society. In 2002 Imre Kertes while recieving the Nobel Prize said that all his works were written because of fascination with Borowski's prose.