 Following two year imprisonment at Auschwitz, Borowski had been liberated from the Dachau concentration camp in the spring of 1945, and went on to write his collection in the following years in Stalinist Poland.The book, translated in 1959, was featured in the Penguin's series "Writers from the Other Europe" from the 1970s.Borowski was arrested by the Gestapo in 1942.