Kertész, like Levi and Borowski, escaped the gas chambers of Auschwitz, and he’s the only one of the three who hasn’t killed himself—not yet, at least. In 1951, Tadeusz Borowski, all of twenty-eight years old, opened a gas valve and put his head in the oven. The Gestapo had arrested him, a non-Jew, for surreptitiously printing his poetry. Anyone who says the pen is mightier than the sword has never come face-to-face with a gun. Two of my favorite books are The Emigrants and Ota Pavel’s How I Came to Know Fish. What I love about them is that they deal with the Holocaust by looking at it
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