Vince Foster (1945-1993)

In his autobiography My Life, Bill Clinton wrote of his childhood friend Vince Foster:

And I used to play in the backyard with a boy whose yard adjoined mine. He lived with two beautiful sisters in a bigger, nicer house than ours. We used to sit on the grass for hours, throwing his knife in the ground and learning to make it stick. His name was Vince Foster. He was kind to me and never lorded it over me the way so many older boys did with younger ones. He grew up to be a tall, handsome, wise, good man. He became a great lawyer, a strong supporter early in my career, and Hillary's best friend at the Rose Law Firm. Our families socialized in Little Rock, mostly at his house, where his wife, Lisa, taught Chelsea to swim. He came to the White House with us, and was a voice of calm and reason in those crazy early months.

Ray Combs (1956-1996)

Raymond Neil Combs, Jr. was a practicing Mormon who married his childhood sweetheart and had six children with her. He also moved to Los Angeles to make it as a comedian. After a series of bit roles and a successful Tonight Show appearance where he received a standing ovation, in 1988 Combs was tapped to host a revival of the game show Family Feud. He was a sharp, straight-laced contrast with the original host, licentious British rake Richard Dawson. After six years, Combs was unceremoniously dumped and Dawson returned.

Combs' life went downhill. A back injury in a car accident left him in constant pain, his marriage ended, two comedy clubs he owned failed, and the bank foreclosed on his Ohio home. One day he wrecked his California home and the police found him bloody from repeatedly banging his head against the wall. He was admitted to a mental hospital and placed on suicide watch. Despite this, he hung himself with his bedsheets in his hospital room on July 2, 1996 at the age of 40.

Tadeusz Borowski (1922-1951)

Polish author Tadeusz Borowski was born in Zhytomyr in the Ukraine. His parents were victims of the Soviet Gulag and forced resettlement until the family was repatriated to Poland and settled in Warsaw. When the Nazis occupied Poland, Borowski was part of the educational and literary underground, studying literature in secret schools, writing for underground newspapers, and secretly publishing his first poetry collection, Gdziekolwiek Ziemia (Wherever the Earth).

In 1943, he and his fiancee were arrested by the Gestapo in the apartment of a close friend. and eventually ended up in Auschwitz. They were spared the gas chamber because at that point the Nazis were (for the most part) only gassing Jews. Borowski worked at the railway ramp where arriving Jews were relived of their belongings and herded to the gas chambers. Once, on a work detail to Birkenau, he was able to see his fiancee again briefly and at the sight of her shaven head told her "Don't worry, our children won't be bald."

After the war, he and his fiancee were resettled in different countries, but he persuaded her to leave Sweden and return to Poland, now a communist country, and they married. He worked as journalist and wrote his masterpiece, Pożegnanie z Marią (Farewell to Maria, translated into English as This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen), a collection of dark and darkly comic stories about his experience at Auschwitz. His talent was obvious, but his work was denounced for "amorality, decadence, and nihilism". Initially enthusiastic about communism, he became disillusioned. The close friend who was arrested by the Gestapo was now arrested and tortured by the communists.

On July 1, 1951, three days after the birth of his daughter, Borowski committed suicide using a gas stove. It was his third suicide attempt. He was 28.