News
Values and Violence: A Sociological Analysis of Auschwitz. Book on sale at Museum's internet shop
Anna Pawełczyńska's famous book Values and Violence: A Sociological Analysis [of Auschwitz] has gone on sale at the Museum's internet shop (it is available in Polish and German).
The title of the study, Values and Violence, highlights the author's main concern. She is a former Auschwitz prisoner. The subject is values as the basis for human behavior and the violence, inflicted by some people on others, that causes suffering and death.
The book is a sociological analysis of the Auschwitz camp population and the conditions there: people and interpersonal relations in a given time and place.
Pawełczyńska offers a precise, detailed sociological analysis of Auschwitz, revealing the underpinnings and various strata of that world and that system. The various chapters offer a cross-section of the camp and the prisoner population.
In her introduction, Pawełczyńska presents external conditions and the world outside the camp before moving on to specify the space, location, and structure of the camp, the course of a prisoner's day, and, in the fifth and sixth chapters, the heart of the book, an analysis of the differentiation of the prisoner population and the implications of the unequal chances for survival.
Given that the inequality of chances was defined at the moment of arrival in the camp, and that there was an inequality of available defensive mechanisms, Pawełczyńska considers where the prisoners drew their hope, strength, and resistance from.
Based on first-hand experience, this insightful sociological analysis of the prisoner population is an important supplement to the multitude of memoirs and accounts about Auschwitz. Her approach allows her to lay bare the functioning of what is sometimes called "Planet Auschwitz."
The book is available at the Museum and at the Museum's online bookstore.
