Postal Indiscretions: The Correspondence of Tadeusz Borowski by Tadeusz Borowski; TadeuszDrewnowski; Alicia NiteckiReview by: Phillip T. RutherfordSlavic Review, Vol. 67, No. 4 (Winter, 2008), p. 1002Published by:Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27653047 .

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1002 Slavic Review

Postal Indiscretions: The Correspondence ofTadeuszBorowski. Ed. Tadeusz Drewnowski. Trans.

Alicia Nitecki. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2007. xiii, 384 pp. Appen dixes. Notes. Index. Illustrations. Photographs. $35.00, hard bound.

"My dears, I survived the war" (35), writes Tadeusz Borowski to his family from a displaced

persons camp near Munich on 3 August 1945. But for the poet of underground Warsaw, soon to be the founding father of "prose after Auschwitz" (12), the war was not over.

Though the smoke had cleared over the battlefields, and over Birkenau, the pall over

Borowski's psyche never lifted. He would remain Auschwitz prisoner #119,198. And he

would not survive.

Borowski was a poet at heart, and a fine poet he was, but he is celebrated outside Pol ish literary circles mainly for his prose and, ironically enough, for his very first effort at

narrative writing. Together with former Auschwitz inmates Krystyn Olszewski and Janusz Nel Siedlecki, Borowski collaborated to produce a series of short stories in the summer and fall of 1945 that were published the following year in Poland under the title Bylismy w Oswiecimiu (We were in Auschwitz). Borowski's four magnificent contributions, most no

tably Proste pa?stwa do gazu (This way for the gas, ladies and gentlemen), established the

twenty-four-year-old as the leading pioneer of Polish Holocaust literature. His Auschwitz stories (he went on to compose several more) stand, the critic and essayist Jan Kott wrote in 1976, as "one of the cruelest of testimonies to what men did to men, and a

pitiless verdict that anything can be done to a human being" (introduction to Tadeusz Borowski, This Way to the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, 1976, 12).

Borowski's literary canon?poetry, prose, and journalistic writings?has long been available in Polish, but only his concentration camp stories, a thin volume of selected po ems, and an occasional verse in an

anthology have appeared in English. Postal Indiscretions, first published in Polish in 2001, should spark interest in the young writer and will lead, I

hope, to the translation of more of his work. Amassed, carefully organized, and authen ticated by his biographer Tadeusz Drewnowski and lovingly translated by Alicia Nitecki,

Borowski's correspondence spans the eight and a half years from his arrest by the Gestapo in February 1943 to his suicide in July 1951. These letters?to and from friends, family

members, and fellow Polish writers and intellectuals?cover Borowski's two horrific years in Pawiak, Auschwitz, and Dachau; the anxiety of the war's immediate aftermath, "rather

weird times when it is not clear who is alive and who has already died" (41) ; his return to a devastated Poland in 1946, where he reunited with his fianc?e and later wife Maria Rundo, also a former Auschwitz inmate; his

subsequent career as a writer, journalist, and editor in Warsaw and East Berlin, during which he became a member of the Communist Party and

a propagandist for socialist realism; and his growing disillusionment with the new politi cal and cultural order in postwar eastern

Europe he was helping to create. They offer the

reader not only a telling glimpse of Borowski's character, but also a

striking portrait of the most tragic and chaotic period in

twentieth-century European history painted by those who suffered

through it.

In a valuable appendix, Drewnowski provides short biographical sketches of the many

correspondents found in Postal Indescretions. Those unfamiliar with the intellectual land scape of postwar Poland may find it helpful to read these biographies before tackling the correspondence, itself.

"I'm just a bit tired," Auschwitz prisoner #119,198 wrote to his mother in January 1944, "and I fear that I will never be the same as before" (23). Indeed, he would not. Borowski's fleeting postwar life calls to mind British writers of World War I?Robert Graves, Edmund

Blunden, and Siegfried Sassoon?great literary minds who endured a staggering forma

tive experience they were never really able to shake. But haunted though they were, these

figures managed to carry on. Borowski could not. His war could not end. He personified the gloomy sentiments U.S. Army Air Forces veteran (and future U.S. Poet Laureate) How ard Nemerov expressed in his 1950 poem "Redeployment": "They say the war is over. But

water still / Comes bloody from the taps, and my pet cat / In his disorder vomits worms which crawl / Swiftly away ..."

Phillip T. Rutherford

Marshall University

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