“There can be no beauty if it is paid for by human injustice, nor truth that passes over injustice in silence, nor moral virtue that condones it.”
In this assertion, Tadek critiques poets and philosophers that find the art or truth in devastating happenings throughout history. Tadek uses phenomena such as the building of the Egyptian pyramids as the instances, including the Holocaust and World War II. As a prisoner in the Auschwitz concentration camps, he witnesses the cruelest acts by man towards others. Since he is not Jewish himself, he offers a distinct point of view on the human suffering faced by the victims of the Holocaust. He points out how artists or philosophers can find art, beauty or truth at times like this hence are not truly conveying an objective perspective. In that, they can only convey their own beauty and truth which cannot be justified while injustice is taking place.
“We said that there is no crime that a man will not commit in order to save himself. And, having saved himself, he will commit crimes for increasingly trivial reasons; he will commit them first out of duty, then from habit, and finally - for pleasure.”
The characters in the narratives are dehumanized by other men in the name of ideologies and sinister motives. Tadek takes notice of the fact that the reason for committing a crime comes to a point that it crosses the line. Henceforth, entering into a threshold of absurd reasons that lack any logical justification behind it. In this instance, Tadek alludes to the terrifying atrocities done by the Nazis that crossed this line. The long-term horrors and human suffering faced in the German concentration camps show Tadek the lengths that human beings can be coldhearted.
“It is the camp law: people going to their death must be deceived to the very end.”
As an occupant of the camps, Tadek observes how the Nazis place effort to hide how much the true devastations of the camps really stretched. The concentration camps on face value were made to seem as functional units that did not necessarily exterminate people. The gas chambers were never overtly announced to the prisoners but their existence only spread through rumors. In the face of mortality, humans can rise up in defense of their own life, thus the suffering and deaths were made to seem as circumstances of the warfare taking place. Therefore, the prisoners were not aware that the camps were designed to foster the extermination of an entire social group.
