At that time a few dozen young writers and college graduates in the party traveled from Poland to the East and the West, either to study or to carry out special missions. From Moscow they returned with an incurable ache, depressed and frightened; from the West they returned with smiles and much contempt for decaying capitalism.

—Jan Kott, Introduction to Tadeusz Borowski, This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, (New York: Penguin Books, 1976), 19-20.