Anna Pawelczynska

Values and Violence in Auschwitz

Being part of the camp resistance movement was the greatest privilege. Along with the higher place in the camp hierarchy, thanks to which one's chances of survival were increased, went the awareness of participation in a battle. A member of a camp organization was no longer just a hunted animal, but in his own mind became a complete human person, doing battle with criminals. Regardless of how unequal the two sides of the battle, the very consciousness of being able to resist, to cooperate, to participate in rescuing others created a mental climate that in the awareness of support from an organized structure inside the camp and the awareness of cooperation with those who were fighting in freedom.

The battle for value has different dimensions. One can evaluate it on a scale of results and by the measure of energy needed to take part in it. The objective consequences of organized resistance were certainly greater for the rescue of prisoners than the results of solitary efforts.

To fully evaluate the crucial significance of camp organizations in the battle for human life and basic values and their large role in aiding prisoners, one must (viewing actions in relation to situations) acknowledge the greatness of thousands of anonymous actions and gestures. In hopeless situations stepping forward in defense of another person regardless of the reprisals to which the defender exposed himself was very rarely effective. The victory that he carried off was won in another dimension: in the world of values.

Irrespective of the level of organization on which the prisoners' resistance movement operated, or how it asserted itself in the context of concrete situations, it was responsible for the rescue of all those who survived the camp. There is not one survivor who did not find support and help among fellow prisoners. No one could have survived on his own physical and mental strength. The majority of those who perished also experienced such aid, if it was at all possible.

Every manifestation of resistance, even though reprisals (and guilt by association) threatened those who took part in it, cracked the structure of terror, proved to those who had lost hope that hope existed, showed that there were indeed ways out of a dead-end situation, and they were various. Every method of opposition—no matter whether it increased the survival odds for a group of prisoners or a particular person, or was the immediate cause of death for the resister—expressed a protest against violence.

Every manifestation of loyalty and cooperation was proof that terror liberates the strength to resist and produces attitudes of self-reliance. This self-reliance was expressed not only through the struggle for life but also through independent choice of the type of death. This struggle for life and self-reliance was also waged in the sphere of values. Every gesture of loyalty, of sympathy, and of organized resistance was an externalization and a defense of the basic values of European civilization against the terrorism of those who denied the existence of those values.

It is hard to say whether this resistance would have been possible in the conditions at Auschwitz had there not existed that frame of reference, those fighting nations of Europe. This common system of values united prisoners and their nations and strengthened their resistance, thanks to the sense of support. The Germans who resisted the turning of their government into a terroristic Nazi gang during the period 1933-39 did not have such support.