Tadeusz Borowski, who wrote these stories, lived through Auschwitz somehow, and left sharply told tales of hell behind. There is nothing to say about them by way of commentary; they just need to be read. But his guilt (one has to assume) was so unconquerable that he killed himself – by gas, indeed – in 1951. He had, as he puts it in this book, “broken daily bread with the beast”; and so the Nazis claimed another victim. But without his testimony, and that of those like him, we would not know.