Author. His short story collection “This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen” (1959), based on his World War II experiences in Nazi death camps, is considered a masterpiece of Holocaust Literature. Written in a pitiless documentary style,  these first-person accounts compel readers to imagine what they would do to survive in similar circumstances.  They were gathered from two books published during Borowski’s lifetime:  “Farewell to Maria” (1948) and “World of Stone” (1948).  Born in the Ukraine to Polish parents,  Borowski spent most of his childhood in Siberia,  where his father was imprisoned in a labor camp as an enemy alien.  The elder Borowski was released in 1932 and the family eventually reunited in Warsaw.  During the Nazi occupation of Poland Borowski attended illegal, clandestine university courses and early in 1943 produced a volume of poems,  “Wherever the Earth”,  which he printed himself on a mimeograph machine.  A few weeks later his fiancee Maria was arrested by the Gestapo,  and when Borowski went to search for her he too was captured.  Both were sent to Auschwitz,  where the gassing en masse of non-Jews had ceased only three weeks before.  Borowski worked as an orderly and was then assigned roofing detail in the women’s camp at Birkenau,  where he was able to see Maria every day.  With the Allied advance in the Summer of 1944 Borowski was transferred to Dachau in Germany,  which was liberated by the Americans on May 1,  1945;  he returned to Warsaw and married Maria the following year.  Borowski rapidly gained a reputation as a promising writer and journalist.  He joined the Communist Party in 1948 and received several government awards.  But he was oppressed by memories of the horrors he had lived through in the camps,  and grew disillusioned with life in postwar Poland.  Having escaped the Nazi gas chambers,  Borowski committed suicide by gassing himself to death in his Warsaw apartment.  He was 28. (bio by: Bobb Edwards)