Some reflections on Auschwitz-related ethical problems

What were the thoughts and feelings of an Auschwitz prisoner, dressed in striped gear, caught between the cogs of the camp machinery, facing mental and physical destruction, who often had to take decisions that involved difficult moral choices? What good or what kinds of good was he or she to prefer when so much good was threatened? What moral judgement can be passed on his or her conduct?

The period of the Second World War is well documented, but museum exhibits and volumes of archived evidence can afford us just a glimpse of the extremely complex ethical problems that were encountered by people incarcerated behind the live wire fence. On the other hand, plenty of valuable information is scattered in memoirs and recollections, some of which are still waiting to be recorded.

In the recent years¹ more and more expectations have been voiced for a comprehensive approach in science, literature, and art that would encompass the totality of the wartime experience of humankind. It is believed such syntheses would enrich our knowledge about the human being. The postulate is absolutely justified. In order to understand humanity better, to judge the evildoers rightly, to assess the scale of the evil, and to appreciate the acts of heroism, altruism, and self‑sacrifice that man proved to be capable of, we need more research on the ethical problems of that period, especially as they substantially increased the burden which a prisoner had to carry and which indeed could crush him or her to death.

It was exactly their moral stance that turned thousands of people into heroes and earned them an excellent reputation.

Perhaps at this point the term “Auschwitz‑related ethical problems” should be explained. Obviously, similar, specific ethical problems arose in other concentration camps and in all those places where people were imprisoned and faced such situations. So in this article, “Auschwitz,” both as a noun and modifier, does not refer exclusively to the location on the Soła River² and the Second World War.

It is helpful to define the uniqueness of Auschwitz‑related ethical problems, explain why they were so special and complex, and why they provoked many controversial assessments and opinions. I cannot offer an objective, scientific treatment of those matters. My perceptions are affected by my recollections and emotions as well as the rather infrequent discussions I have held on such issues with other survivors of concentration camps. Even as I am writing these words, I feel uneasy, because my former fellow‑prisoners may have been right, after all, warning me: “Don’t touch that topic. They won’t understand us. You can understand it only if you were there.” Still, “that topic” has to be investigated. So to begin, I will just sketch a few situations by way of example.

We need to travel back in time. Let us imagine it is a January morning in the camp. In Industriehof II, a Muselmann, reduced to a sixty‑pound skeleton, is doing his light work, leichte Arbeit. Sitting on a heap of bricks, he is crushing brick fragments into powder. The day did not start well at all. He did not manage to steal a frozen potato from an earthed heap where pig fodder is kept. Such a potato has the exquisite taste of a gherkin. Other fellow prisoners, as emaciated as him, have just finished talking about larded noodles with pork cracklings and other wonderful dishes, so the pangs of hunger are now getting unbearably strong. It was so good to stay in the camp hospital. The doctor is a real monster for having discharged him so soon. The Muselmann does not know what the prisoner doctor knew: today is the day when the weakest patients are to be selected and then killed in the gas chamber. So the doctor discharged thirty men who were still able to stand up, though on their last legs, and they had to return to their blocks. The majority of them will soon die anyway. There is one thing the doctor does not know: some of those who are selected to be killed are going to survive. They are not being sent to the gas chamber, but to one of the blocks occupied by Muselmänner. The prisoner functionary in that block, by clever tricks and manoeuvres, will once again manage to save a small group of his “wards,” so they won’t be sent to the gas.

Perhaps, from the point of view of ethics, we should condemn both the prisoner doctor and the prisoner functionaries for having taken upon themselves such tasks: the doctor for working in the camp hospital, where patients were selected to be killed and where pseudo‑medical experiments were carried out; the prisoner functionary for supervising other inmates in an isolated block which was the last stopover on their tragic way to the crematorium. Or maybe there’s an ethical viewpoint that requires us to express our greatest admiration for both men for doing their duty in such difficult conditions and frequently risking their own lives to protect other members of the prisoners’ community?

A person favouring the latter view can justify it by saying that it was important for political prisoners³, wearing a red triangular badge, to hold such positions in order to outnumber criminals⁴ incarcerated in the camp and performing similar functionary tasks. The “red” functionaries were expected to curb violence and thus keep the number of casualties at the lowest achievable level. But which of the two decisions was ethically right? Maybe both, depending on many other circumstances. So what were those circumstances? Or maybe just one of the decisions was right, but which one? Or neither, but why?

Let us return to our Muselmann. How is he going to end his day when his hunger makes him oblivious of the bitter cold, the lice biting his inflamed skin, and the scabies? Perhaps he is going to try and get an extra ration of soup, queuing up for the meal for the second time. He doesn’t stand much of a chance of success, and then he’ll be brutally beaten by a prisoner functionary. But the situation may be worse. If the Muselmann steals somebody else’s bread and gets caught, he will be killed by the functionary or, with his tacit approval, lynched by other prisoners. Of course both of the prisoner functionary’s deeds are bad, and he deserves to be blamed. The Muselmann, on the other hand, had to wangle more soup or pinch some bread, he could not have acted otherwise, given the circumstances. His deeds resulted from the current state of his body. He could not have behaved in a different way.

Yet the prisoner functionary was right to severely beat or even kill the thief. If the culprit had gone unpunished, other weak, starving people would have been encouraged to become more audacious and steal the food of those who were even weaker and more emaciated. A defender of this position would say we have to assess the case of robbing one’s fellow prisoners regardless of whether we believe in determinism or indeterminism. So again we see one can hold totally disparate opinions about the same situation, and which of them is right?

Finally, it may happen that the Muselmann does not commit any such deeds, but, quite on the contrary, restrains himself and shows his utmost self‑control, giving some of his bread ration to another prisoner in solitary confinement.

The history of the camp abounds in numerous examples of extremely difficult situations that prisoners had to face and deal with. The unending list would prove dauntingly confusing if we were to offer any moral judgement. Yet it is imperative to discuss the complexity of Auschwitz‑related human problems in those inhuman times.

Obviously my primitive, simplistic sketches of situations occurring in camp life do not do any justice to the scale of the problems that are being signalled here. They only help to develop one’s argument and to pose a few questions, serving as a background. Yet even those examples, so inadequately representing camp realities, can illustrate the uniquely intricate ethical issues that confronted any person imprisoned in any Konzentrationslager. What was the source of the specificity of those issues? Maria Ossowska (1957, 263), surveying philosophical views on when a deed may be subject to moral judgement, says: “Our efforts are more economically spent when we judge particular deeds and stick ready‑made labels on them, giving instant pronouncements. If such labels fail to function, we are morally perplexed. That was observed during the war, when the old stereotypes were found inadequate, while newly emerging situations had not been labelled yet and therefore were difficult to judge.”

Undoubtedly, the specificity of Auschwitz‑related ethical problems stems from the fact that all camp life offered a multiplicity of situations that differed—radically, sharply, and drastically—from those that can be encountered in ordinary life. On the other hand, ethical standards, like any other standards, rely on what is average. So if camp problems, including ethical ones, were exceptional, many of them could not fit, at least not without reservations, into previous patterns of proper conduct, commonly accepted norms of morality, and consequently moral judgements that were still in force among the population at large. The reason for the singularity of Auschwitz‑related ethical problems was therefore the divergence between the formerly known, established patterns of behaviour and the actual situations that required moral judgement. The disparity was all too bitterly felt by people in the striped camp gear in situations when only one kind of good, or a very limited number of them, could be saved while numerous other goods could not be preserved. In practice, the question about what kind of good should be protected in complex, conflict‑generating cases would frequently boil down to the necessity of choosing whose life should be preferred above all others and who should be left to their own devices and fate. What should have been done by a prisoner doctor who had only scarce amounts of illicitly procured medication? Who should have been saved when it was impossible to save everybody?

Such situations of conflict often resulted in very difficult dilemmas requiring of a person to choose the lesser evil in order to oppose an evil of greater magnitude. Which was the lesser and which the greater evil? With a number tattooed on your arm, you had to take your decision within minutes or seconds, just on the basis of your subjective perceptions. But even if one had been able to consult the works of the most eminent moral philosophers, no advice could have been found on how to deal with the cases that presented themselves behind the camp gates.

So my first tentative suggestion about the reasons why Auschwitz‑related ethical problems are unique and special is that prisoners very often had to choose between the greater and lesser evil.

Such a statement makes it possible to move on to another problem. An ethicist who is not acquainted with the particulars of life in a concentration camp might reasonably ask: Is it possible, from the point of view of ethics, to pass a positive moral judgement on a deed that involved choosing evil, even though the perpetrator considered it a lesser evil? Because the choice was his or her … Thus it is necessary to consider to what extent concentration camp prisoners can be judged, according to the usual ethical standards, for their deeds, their passivity or actions in the camp. Maria Ossowska, whom I have quoted above, enumerates the following criteria enabling moral judgements (1957, 231): (i) being conscious of one’s actions and intentionality, which imply a desire to achieve the state of affairs that is going to transpire as a result of one’s deed; (ii) the ability to control one’s conduct.

Without resorting to theoretical reflection and debate, and using Ossowska’s criteria, we can categorize the situations that were often encountered by prisoners. One of the broad categories covers situations that meet the prerequisites listed in the foregoing, can thus receive a positive or negative moral assessment, and comprise a relatively vast realm of interrelations, conditions of living and working. In order to avoid any misunderstandings and understatements, this opinion needs to be seriously examined.

Another category embraces all those deeds that were committed by “token perpetrators,” that is people who acted in conditions which did not meet the above listed criteria. In particular, they had no possibility to regulate their own conduct, while their deeds, in essence, deserve to be more or less strongly condemned.

Here a short digression is needed. In my view, some essentially “unethical” deeds were committed by those prisoners who could not choose their own behaviour, as they were coerced by the SS men, physically and psychologically, to participate in the implementation of the latter’s murderous schemes.

Such were the working conditions of the Sonderkommando, a special prisoner unit that had to burn the bodies of people killed in the gas chambers.

Finally, the third category covers the middle of the spectrum, that is those situations when a prisoner had very limited freedom of choice and was forced to choose the lesser evil in order to stop or defy a greater evil, or at least such were his or her intentions.

There is no need to say who was the real perpetrator of those deeds that should be morally condemned and that fall into the second and third category, who was guilty of placing humans in inhuman situations.

What ought to be stressed, nevertheless, is one aspect of Auschwitz‑related ethical problems that brings some solace and makes it possible to affirm, in spite of many other aspects, the moral worth of human beings.

For when we analyse what seems to be an inordinate number of those facts in the camp’s history that can be subjected to moral judgement, we must be astonished by the unexpectedly high proportion of good deeds. We obtain an interminably long list of all those cases when prisoners, facing a conflict between their own and somebody else’s good, sacrificed their own good for the sake of the good of another. The motives behind such unambiguously positive acts were altruism and social instinct, which found their expression in various forms of mutual help, international and national solidarity.

This stunningly high number of deeds that are rated as ethically positive, though they were performed in a place that meant torment and mass murder, confirms in an especially poignant way the truth that was so beautifully phrased by Goethe, who said evil can be a source of good.

Without doubt, it should be extensively investigated why so many prisoners exhibited such an emotional predisposition which guided their conduct and made them show their dedication, perseverance, and courage in an utterly hostile environment.

***
This text is a loose collection of inadequately systematised thoughts about Auschwitz‑related ethical problems. As I have emphasised, my reflections derive mainly from my personal experience and subjective understanding.

The topic definitely deserves to be researched in detail, in its own right, and to be presented in specialist publications.

Translated from the original article: Gawalewicz, A. Z rozważań na temat oświęcimskiej problematyki moralnej. Przegląd Lekarski – Oświęcim, 1967.

Notes

1. The article was first published in 1967.
2. The Auschwitz site is on the banks of the Soła River, a tributary of the Vistula.
3. Anyone suspected of having opposed the Germans in any way as registered as “political prisoner.”
4. Criminals sent to German concentration camps had a green badge on their prison gear.