This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen / Tadeusz Borowski

Published in Poland after World War II, this collection of concentration camp stories shows atrocious crimes becoming an unremarkable part of a daily routine. Prisoners eat, work, sleep, and fall in love a few yards from where other prisoners are systematically slaughtered. The will to survive overrides compassion, and the line between the normal and the abnormal wavers, then vanishes. Borowski, a concentration camp victim himself, understood what human beings will do to endure the unendurable. Together, these stories constitute not only a masterpiece of Polish - and world - literature but stand as cruel testimony to the level of inhumanity of which man is capable.

http://www.penguin.co.uk/nf/Book/BookDisplay/0,,9780140186246,00.html?breadcrumbList=9780140186246%2A&bcPath=c590614%2D00000000%23%23%2D1%23%23%2D1%7E%7Eq393738303134303138363234362a&searchProfile=UK-590614-global&strSrchSql=9780140186246