Outside help—contacts with the resistance movement outside the camp and with the population who lived in the vicinity
—was part of the odds favoring the resistance movement, as was the awareness that the era of concentration camps had to end, regardless of who would be granted individual survival. The vision of another life—a free, normal life—injected energy. . .
Anna Pawełczyńska, Values and Violence in Auschwitz
by: Dr. Adele Valeria
Anna Pawełczyńska (20 April 1922-21 June 2014) grew up in a middle-class Polish family in Warsaw, Poland.
She was only 17 years old when, in the aftermath of Germany’s 1939 invasion of Poland, she arranged a program of humanitarian aid for wounded Polish soldiers. She was a young girl, one of the generation of young people who witnessed more confirmation of Poland’s tragic past during the conflict and a return to foreign rule and dependence. Pawełczyńska soon joined the underground army to fight against the Nazis. She was a youth movement member: she served as both a carrier for the underground press and as a liaison for an officer in Union for Armed Struggle (Związek Walki Zbrojnej; ZWZ) in the Warsaw district. This underground army was renamed Home Army (Armia Krajowa, AK) in February 1942.
Pawełczyńska’s political goals were, like those of all other resisting Poles, strongly centered on the struggle for the country’s independence. She was a partisan who participated in secret study sessions to prepare herself for her final exams. While sitting her exams, the Gestapo detained the group of instructors. She was also arrested, at the age of 20, by German authorities for having joined the Home Army.
For nine months starting on August 15, 1942, she was held captive in Pawiak prison. Without receiving any condemnation or formal sentence, she was sent to Auschwitz Birkenau on May 13, 1943 due to her resistance to torture during interrogation. She occupied the position of a non-Jewish prisoner in the Konzentrationslager Auschwitz-Birkenau camp where she stayed as a Polish political prisoner number 44764 to October 1944. For the entire period of May 1943 to October 1944 in Auschwitz, Pawełczyńska participated in the resistance movement within the camp, and served on the command team for the women’s camp. Forging documents and supporting clandestine operations among resistance groups were some of the ways she got involved in the resistance movement within the camp. In order to compile a secret list of children and women who were transported to Auschwitz in August and September 1944, she put her life on the line with Zofia Brodzikowską-Pohorecka, Janina Tollik, Zarzycka Anna, and Maria Mazurkiewicz. Lists are frequently the sole means of proving the presence of an individual at Auschwitz. She witnessed the destruction of Crematorium IV through her own eyes.
For certain, the activities of the organized resistance consisted in establishing all contacts with organizations outside the camp and transmitting documents through them that communicated what was going on in the camp; also, the collecting, transferring and delivering of these documents were organized activities, as were the frequently successful destruction or falsification of documents directly threatening to the life of individual prisoners. Their activities also included operations requiring great skill and coordination on the part of their members living in the various subcamps: such as, for example, the planning of a strategy for defense in the event of all-out danger, or the revolt of the Sonderkommando—long in preparation but prematurely set in motion—that resulted in the destruction of two crematories and an attempted mass escape. The same coordination and careful preparatory work (which required making connections with local residents and conspiratorial organizations outside the camp) were also indispensable for arranging escapes from the camp. Information concerning the existence and functions of the Nazi concentration camp, including partial lists of prisoners, was transmitted to countries not occupied by the Nazis, thanks to the activity of the camp organizations (Pawełczyńska, Values and Violence in Auschwitz, 115)
When Pawełczyńska, along with some prisoner detachments, worked in subcamps outside of the main camp, she took advantage of favorable situations that arose. Due to illness, she was kept in the prisoners’ sickroom until the late fall of 1943. She was reassigned to Dresden at the end of October 1944. Following her transfer to Konzentrationslager Flossenbürg of the Zeiss-Ikon group, in April 1945 she managed to escape during an evacuation and found safety in the forest until May 7. She put together an assistance program for Poles returning home from here onwards in June.
Pawełczyńska started taking sociology courses back in Warsaw in 1945 with Stanisław Ossowski and Maria Ossowska and Jan Strzelecki. In 1960, she completed her doctorate with supervision of Ossowski. The Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences saw her as a productive professor. The refusal to adhere to rigid Marxism and mechanical assimilation of Marx’s axioms was passed down to her from Ossowski. He taught her how to merge historical and sociological categories, which had a significant impact on her. Specifically, his ‘Prawa “historyczne” w socjologii’ [‘“Historical” Laws of Sociology’ (1935)] permitted her to represent her experience at Auschwitz, as a non-Jewish prisoner in Values and Violence in Auschwitz: A Sociological Analysis [Wartości a przemoc: Zarys socjologicznej problematyki Oświęcimia] in 1973. Her writing about Auschwitz was not done during the war or even at its conclusion, but rather after thirty years of silence, during which she acquired the fundamental concepts of sociology, criminology, and history. During the Stalinist period, she undertook different studies in the field, specifically concerning juvenile delinquency. Assuming this stance, she was a member of a study group in the Criminology Section of the Polish Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Legal Studies. She visited France as a visiting sociologist at the Institute of Demography and Public Opinion Research in 1956, also known as the Thaw year. With her diverse training, she became proficient in statistics, ecology, and urban studies. Her contributions to the connection between the environment, society, and territory are notable.
By employing scientific activities in the field of empirical social research, she was able to explain Auschwitz sociologically, leaving aside religious naturalism.
From her Dilemma to a Book: The Sociological mission of a Resistant Survivor
Pawełczyńska became a scholar of resistance after being a resistant in the camp. The task of researching and teaching sociology at the university took over her life. She was more than an educator. In order to analyze the social habits of individuals in Auschwitz, for her, establishing a focal point for microhistory in the overall macrohistory context became paramount. Being a scholar and witness to Nazi oppression, she realized that the world and future generations needed comprehensive accounts of what had transpired under the Nazi regime.
Sociology, the discipline she worked in, has only recently gained acceptance for its contribution to Holocaust studies. She took a risk because there was a common belief in the early post-War period that documents were more trustworthy than personal testimony like hers.
Pawełczyńska was the first female member of an organized resistance movement at Auschwitz-Birkenau who later became a member of academia and conducted research on the resistance. Most likely, her studies with Ossowski led her to think about combining historical research with sociological observation, which became the foundation for her study of the resistance efforts in Auschwitz. She is the first to have used historical tools in sociological research in Values and Violence, following the master’s example. She discovered an alternative model in which history and memory may coexist through the combination of history and sociology. Pawełczyńska’s research demonstrated that the academic world had a place for former resistance fighters to study the subject. In her writings, she combines the task with the passion of an Auschwitz survivor who is trying to document what happened in the realm of academic research. The merging became evident in her transition from being a member of an effective resistance movement to becoming a researcher, investigating both Nazi terror and collective memory. Memory and history are deeply connected for Pawełczyńska. In Pawełczyńska’s Values and Violence the attempt to reconstruct memories is not a haphazard effort: it is the foundation for careful documentation and a witness.
Pawełczyńska’s work advances resistance scholarship at least for two aspects. First, the “historical consciousness” that Funkenstein reflected upon is demonstrated by her Auschwitz testimony. The core lesson of Halbwachs can be revisited by reading Value and Violence, and a solution to the conflict between memory and history can be found through this reading.