Tadeusz Borowski

About the Poet 

Tadeusz Borowski was a Polish poet born in 1922 in the Ukraine. Borowski was imprisoned during 1943-1945 in Dachau and Auschwitz. His girlfriend Maria Rundo, of Jewish origin herself, was arrested in Warsaw while trying to help a Jewish friend, and he was arrested because he followed her. He survived this experience by helping the Nazis in these camps. He became a hospital worker, then an orderly. Due to his position as an orderly, he was able to learn that Maria was held in the women’s zone. Despite the separation of the sexes at the camp, he was able to catch a glimpse of Maria from time to time and even provide her with medicines. Then he was assigned to roofer’s duty in the Women’s zone, and he saw Maria daily. During August 1944, the advancing Soviet troops forced the Nazis to evacuate the surviving incarcerated people in Auschwitz to camps located farther to the West, in Germany proper. Borowski spent the next nine months in the camps of Natzweiler-Dautmergen and Dachau-Allach. He died by suicide in 1953 at age 29.