Acoustic Assaults on the Auschwitz-Birkenau Concourse

Abstract

In February 1943, German Jew Ernest Michel was deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau after having been incarcerated in at least six labor prisons since September 1939. In his 1993 memoir, Michel recounted his arrival experience:

Michel characterized the scene as “mayhem,” which was punctuated by a cacophony of anguished cries:

One woman pleaded with the guards: “‘Please, let me go home. Please, let me go home.’ She repeated it incessantly.” The SS angrily retorted: “Let’s go! Move! You can look for each other in hell!” Amid the sonic welter, Michel’s friend Ludwig yelled to him: “Stick together!”; however, Ludwig’s “voice was drowned out by the screams and the barking dogs.” Michel summed up the soundscape: “The noise was like nothing I had ever experienced.” Eventually, “[t]he yelling and screaming died down,” but, according to Michel, the silence only signaled a “sense of foreboding” that “permeated the crowd.” Overcome with fear, the deportees grew “numb.”¹

Michel experienced arrival at Auschwitz-Birkenau as a violent sonic vortex. Not only were the prisoners attacked physically, but they were also assailed by a host of acoustic assaults: the nonstop shouting of the SS, barking dogs, and the sounds of bodies being pummeled. The soundscape was also rife with the deportees’ own sounds of suffering: wails, calls to loved ones, pleas, and screams. Michel further emphasized that everything happened so rapidly that he “could hardly take it in,” which likely prompted the guard to ask, “‘Don’t you hear well?’” While the detainees could hear, most could not comprehend, for the physical and acoustic violence colluded to leave them wholly debilitated, which compromised their ability to respond to the extreme persecution in that moment.

Michel’s testimony cleary shows that sound played a critical role on the Auschwitz-Birkenau concourse. From the guards’ perspective, sound was a tool to manage the human sorting operation—to send some arrivals to the gas chambers while reserving others for slave labor. From the deportees’ vantage point, the perpetrators’ threatening noises induced pure terror, which in turn impelled many to sound out their own outpourings of fear and pain. This article explores the noises that flooded the ramp, focusing on the perpetrators’ acoustic assaults and the captives’ hearing experiences, to demonstrate how the sonic environment was instrumental to the genocide.

Methods

Since the growth of interest in the history of sound in the 1990s, researchers from various disciplines have published a substantial body of sound scholarship. Sound studies investigates acoustic experiences, practices, and discourses to uncover essential facets of human life, including social organization, cultural practices, and power relations. Historical acoustemology (a sonic way of knowing and being in the world) conceives of sounds as cultural constructions that are embedded in specific social worlds. According to composer and musician Pauline Oliveros, sounds are freighted with strata of “[i]deas, feelings, and memories” from past worlds.² Sound studies explores the nature, practices, and meanings of sounds to show how sonic terrains shaped social relations.³ In particular, the field focuses on the meanings historical actors ascribed to sounds to decipher the “codes of life,” according to social theorist Jacques Attali.⁴ Listening to enculturated sonic panoramas, the method frames sonic experiences phenomenologically to consider how hearing encounters shaped individuals’ or specific groups’ ways of knowing and being.⁵ This opens the door to better understanding individual experiences, making it a powerful tool to examine Jews’ sonic experiences at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Despite the explosion of sound research, Holocaust studies, with the exception of musicology, has only recently begun to explore the genocide’s auditory aspects.⁶ On the platform, detainees heard a multitude of sounds that were subsequently documented by survivors, the “earwitnesses,” subjects who “intimately” experienced and chronicled the soundscape, as sound studies pioneer and composer R. Murray Schafer proposes.⁷ My research extends Schafer’s concept of “earwitness” beyond documentation. While Schafer defines an “earwitness” as “one who testifies … to what he or she has heard,”⁸ I demonstrate that Holocaust earwitnesses were more than auditors; they were also subjects, who were assailed by the perpetrators’ brutal noises and fellow victims’ anguished outpourings.

Holocaust earwitnesses detailed myriad consequential experiences, many of which the sense of sight simply eclipsed. Their accounts of the platform’s acoustic environment and their aural experiences within it reveal fundamental aspects about the genocide, including the ways that power and violence operated, the extreme difficulty detainees faced in responding to the radical persecution that besieged them instantaneously on the ramp, their systematic degradation, and their profound trauma. Exploring these problems, this analysis deepens the understanding of the arrival experience specifically and the Holocaust broadly.

Shifting from eyewitnessing to earwitnessing, this essay listens to the arrival soundscape soundbite by soundbite through survivors’ postwar accounts. This approach draws from Pauline Oliveros’s practice of “deep listening,” which is a meditative technique in which the listener directs attention to each element in a sonic space.⁹ Situating individual sounds within their larger multifaceted aural environments, deep listening observes how sounds behave and interact with each other. The aim, as Oliveros explains, is to plunge beneath the surface of sound to “[unlock] layer after layer of imagination, meaning and memory down to the cellular level of human experience.”¹⁰ By listening carefully to the Auschwitz-Birkenau ramp and attending to both individual sounds and their dynamic conglomeration, a deep listening approach unearths the arrivals’ auditory experiences to reveal the ways that sonic encounters beset the prisoners.

Examining the concourse’s sonic panorama through deep listening raises vital questions about sound reception. To delve into deportees’ hearing experiences, I apply methods associated with sensory studies. This field examines sensate experiences and the sensatory codes through which societies order themselves. Similar to sound studies, a sensory approach frames perceptual experiences within their historical contexts, underscoring that the ways of sensing are largely culturally constructed, as opposed to biologically deterministic readings of the human sensorium. Scholars generally situate sensorial experiences at the nexus of the social and the corporeal.¹¹ On the one hand, social environments shape sensatory perceptions, for it is through the senses that the external world enters one’s interior being.¹² As historian Alain Corbin contends in his landmark monograph on the struggles over bell ringing in France, Revolutionary bell ringing practices “profoundly altered the culture of the senses in rural France.”¹³ On the other hand, the senses, themselves, actively create meaning and reciprocally influence social life. This postulation emphasizes that hearing is not simply an exercise in internalizing exterior life. Rather, there is a complex, dynamic interplay between the social world and the sensorium.

Historical acoustemology considers how societies in the past constructed unique audial worlds that shaped acoustic perceptions and practices. Hearing encounters, as Holocaust survivors consistently emphasized, were exceptionally potent. This potency was due, in part, to the immersive quality of audial encounters.¹⁴ Indeed, an auditor can become entirely enveloped inside a sonic space, which underlines the intrinsicly affective nature of hearing. Such insights are particularly apropos to studying deportees’ experiences because the intense sonic bombardment on the Auschwitz-Birkenau platform engulfed them in ways that violently assaulted the sensorium.

An examination of sensorial engagements implicates the body in multiple ways, for not only is the perceptual perceived through the body, but it is also registered in the body. Sensory encounters are comprehensive somatic experiences that produce a kinesthetic energy that is palpably felt.¹⁵ The social is also at work in sensatory operations. As historian Constance Classen posits, “We experience our bodies—and the world—through our senses. Thus the cultural construction of sensory perception conditions our experience and understanding of our bodies and the world at a fundamental level.”¹⁶ The ways that the body feels and moves somatosensorily result from a process of enculturation that springs from social life. As anthropologist Kathryn Geurts maintains, in sensing, the body accumulates data from “society’s epistemology, the development of its cultural identity, and its forms of being-in-the-world.”¹⁷ That is, collective sensate structures cultivate social codes, knowledge, and identities that embed themselves in an individual’s sensorium. At the same time, the body is an enactive force that autonomously generates meaning through sensory encounters.

In the realm of hearing, the body can be strikingly active, for the force of sound produces movements within the body that traverse the senses in complex ways.¹⁸ As Martin Daughtry shows, in wartime Iraq, “people listened with their ears—but also with their skin, their chest cavities, the hair on the back of their necks, their viscera.”¹⁹ Composer Sharon Stewart’s “somatic listening” practice draws attention to the ways that the body perceives and feels sound.²⁰ While Stewart’s approach marries sound and body through a deliberative listening exercise, hearing experiences often flow within the body without a person’s awareness.²¹ Because most arrivals at Auschwitz-Birkenau experienced the soundscape as a sudden sonic avalanche, I focus on their hearing experiences, which were generally apprehended unconsciously and registered through sensory operations.

Given that the body was the principal object of the genocide, an examination of the numerous ways the perpetrators violated, degraded, and destroyed bodies is central to understanding the Holocaust. Beginning in the 1920s, the Nazis deployed sound to arouse the public’s senses to induce emotional attachment to their ideology. As media scholar Carolyn Birdsall maintains, manipulating sound “was an intrinsic part of the desire to orchestrate sensory experiences.”²² In its persecution and genocide of Jews, the Third Reich also deployed a vast arsenal of sensory weapons; however, few scholars have studied Jews’ sensate experiences. Even Birdsall only cursorily discusses Jews’ auditory worlds. Similarly, historian Yaron Jean focuses on the ways that the Nazi regime cast Jews as a “sonic disturbance” and menace to society, rather than on how Jews heard racial persecution.²³ Three notable sensory studies are Holocaust studies scholar Simone Gigliotti’s monograph of the sensory contusions inflicted upon prisoners during deportations,²⁴ historian Jacob Flaws’ investigation of sensatory witnessing at Treblinka,²⁵ and historian Nikolaus Wachsmann’s article on senses and emotions at Auschwitz-Birkenau.²⁶ This aritcle builds upon their research, demonstrating that the perpetrators’ acoustic violence on the Auschwitz-Birkenau concourse marked a wholesale sensory attack that lodged itself in the victims’ traumatized bodies.

To excavate deportees’ audial experiences, this study pores over a diverse body of written and oral testimonies given over seven decades by Jews from different origin countries. The approach heeds historian Saul Friedländer’s 1997 call for an “integrative and integrated history”²⁷ of the Holocaust, “carried by personal stories,”²⁸ thus recasting victims as historical subjects, as opposed to anonymous disempowered genocidal objects. Following Friedländer, scholars published significant works that featured survivors’ accounts.²⁹ This essay similarly excavates the experiences of the Holocaust from the victims’ perspectives to investigate how the Holocaust was felt somatically and emotionally. It specifically spotlights the testimonies of those who did not achieve international recognition, concurring with historian Tony Kushner about the value of “ordinary survivors’ testimonies.”³⁰ Expanding the source base, the approach evaluates the representativeness of each account and identifies “recurring patterns” in the testimonies, which form the basis of a “core of shared memory” of the Holocaust, as historian Christopher Browning posits.³¹

Memories, psychiatrist Samata Sharma explains, “are always … fragmentary.” Disassembled for storage by the brain, when actuated, memories “are reconsolidated.” They are “literally re-collected.”³² Scholars from a variety of disciplines examine how survivors “reconsolidated” their memories as testimony. Many point out that survivors typically focused on searing touchstone experiences that they shaped into narratives. Literary scholar Lawrence Langer refers to this as “common memory,” which is the memory that creates order out of seemingly “chaotic episodes.”³³ This resembles psychologist Robert Kraft’s concept of “narrative memory.”³⁴

As this article demonstrates, survivors’ testimonies about their arrival followed a similar “narrative memory”; however, sprinkled throughout were vivid recollections of jarring sounds and sights that often disrupted a story’s linear progression. Especially prominent were descriptions of gunfire, screams, wails, strange-looking inmates, and the vanishing sight of loved ones. Scholars demonstrate that people often remember traumatic events as a series of harrowing images that flash by, called “flashbulb memory.”³⁵ These phenomenal recollections can resist narration, especially when the memories overwhelm the storytellers.³⁶ Holocaust survivors often recounted their experiences as “a staccato of snapshot images,” as clinical psychologist and playwright Henry Greenspan explains;³⁷ however, they also detailed the jolting sounds that bombarded them in quick succession on the arrival ramp. These sonic flash memories were especially common in oral testimonies in which interviewees modulated their voices to communicate their acoustic experiences. Interviews, to be sure, are performances that recount the past not only in words but also in paralanguage (e.g., intonation, pitch, pauses, and facial expressions).³⁸ In fact, as a transcript, an interview might seem rather flat, but when listened to or viewed, that same testimony can come alive through the interviewee’s voice.³⁹ Indeed, voices have the capacity to tell stories, including sonic and emotional stories. As cultural studies scholar Anne Karpf asserts, the voice is “a superb guide to fear and power, anxiety and subservience.”⁴⁰

Recounting the arrival as a series of flashing sounds and sights underscores that survivors often cast their recollections as a string of disconnected experiential fragments, and trauma in fact compounded the fractured nature of their memories. As education scholar Craig Barclay explains, “There are no known narrative structures that can be used as referents from which to reconstruct traumatic experiences like those associated with the daily experience of seeing others selected and exterminated.”⁴¹ As a result, Holocaust chronicles, particularly when given as oral testimony, usually took the shape of micronarratives of specific events. Scholars refer to these fragmented recollections as “episodic memory.”⁴²

Narrating pivotal traumatic episodes, ordinary survivors often prioritized storytelling over intentional introspection. This tendency was often due to the nature of trauma, itself, which deters contemplation. As Robert Kraft hypothesizes, when relaying traumatic experiences, “reflective thought disappears,” and “emotion and response disconnect” from one another, leaving shards of painful memories that survivors struggled to verbalize.⁴³ In fact, trauma interferes with brain activity where communicable language takes shape.⁴⁴ It is, thus, unsurprising that many survivors were rendered speechless when they recounted their most harrowing ordeals, expressed consummately by psychiatrist and survivor Dori Laub: “There are never enough words or the right words … to articulate the story that cannot be fully captured in thought, memory and speech.”⁴⁵

Emotions compounded survivors’ struggles to narrate their experiences. They play a determinant role in memory, as not only the process of remembering stirs emotions, but also emotions facilitate recall, particularly in oral testimony.⁴⁶ Managing emotions, however, can severely burden the narrator, and therefore, survivors “impose[d] control on memory” to restrain their recollections, as historian Mark Roseman maintains.⁴⁷ Historian Alistair Thomson calls this “strategies of containment,” which people employ to “remake or repress memories of experiences which are still painful and ‘unsafe.’”⁴⁸

Managing emotions was often elusive for survivors, however, as their narratives broke down at critical junctures when memories rooted in affective phenomenal experiences overwhelmed them. Reopening past wounds, testimonies have the capacity to arouse sensorial and affective sensations lodged in the body. Lawrence Langer argues that remembrances of trauma are “psychological event[s]” that mark “frozen moments of anguish.”⁴⁹ But memory is sedimented in both the mind and the body. According to philosopher Edward Casey, the body “furnishes an unmediated access to the remembered past.”⁵⁰ When the body recalls trauma, somatic memories transport individuals back to the time of the original injury, reviving past afflictions. For Kraft, these embodied sensations form the basis of “core memory,” that is, the memory of the original phenomenal experiences.⁵¹ Kraft’s concept aligns with Langer’s theory of “deep memory,” which is the memory of emotions that had burrowed themselves into the body long ago. When stirred, these embodied emotions “corrode the comforts of common memory.”⁵² Clinical social workers Nathalie Saltikoff and Dana Modell affirm that people who suffer from posttraumatic syndrome disorder (PTSD) can experience sensorial flashbacks that are refelt, although they often resist linguistic expression.⁵³ In examining survivors’ testimonies of arrival at Auschwitz-Birkenau, the narratives did, indeed, fall apart when emotions, rooted in the original sensorial afflictions, unsettled the storytellers.

The sonic maelstrom on the train platform

The genesis of Auschwitz-Birkenau began with the invasion of Poland in September 1939 when Germany seized the military barracks, renaming it “Auschwitz.” Initially, the prison was for Polish activists, who began to arrive in June 1940. In late 1941, Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler ordered an expansion of the prison, primarily to provide slave labor to IG-Farben factories and other German concerns. At the same time, Himmler ordered the construction of Birkenau to incarcerate prisoners of war, principally from the Soviet Union. The complex quickly mushroomed to include the original prison (Auschwitz I), Birkenau (Auschwitz II), Monowice (Monowitz)-Buna Werke (Auschwitz III), and at least forty-four subprisons. Mass executions with Zyklon B began in September 1941 in Block 11 of Auschwitz I, where the Germans experimentally murdered approximately six hundred Soviet soldiers and two hundred and fifty sick inmates. Located approximately two miles from Auschwitz I, Birkenau opened in March 1942. That summer, Himmler ordered the construction of four gas chambers and crematoria, which came into operation in spring 1943. The rail line directly into Birkenau, one of the most iconic images of Auschwitz-Birkenau, was completed in spring 1944 in preparation for the escalation of killings in summer 1944, largely of Jews from Hungarian territories. Previously, prisoners had arrived at a nearby freight station on the so-called “Jews’ ramp” (Judenrampe). Altogether, Germany sent about 1.3 million people to Auschwitz-Birkenau, of whom approximately 1.1 million perished.⁵⁴

Survivor accounts of their arrivals were remarkably similar. This consistency was due not only to the fact that the SS replicated the operation nearly every day, but also to the likely influence of other survivors’ testimonies, Holocaust histories, and popular culture, which depict disembarkation.⁵⁵ Survivors emphasized the following. The trains arrived in darkness, abruptly awakening the prisoners. The doors were unbolted, and klieg lights blazed down, blinding the deportees and causing sensory disorientation after having been confined in darkness for days. Some people felt unqualified relief, for they could not imagine that they would endure anything worse than the savage train ride. Indeed, many were eager to exit the tightly packed freight cars whose floors were filled with excrement, urine, and corpses. Immediately, the shouting commenced: “Raus! Raus! Raus!”—Out! Out! Out! The detainees rapidly climbed out of the cars, often trampling each other. The SS clubbed those who failed to move quickly. Although the guards managed the operation methodically, most victims experienced it as utter pandemonium. People wailed and called out to each other desperately. Severely weakened by the debilitating journey, many collapsed. Gunfire rang out and people fell. Most were taken aback by the prisoners on the platform whom they assumed were criminals. These men, along with the guards, directed the arrivals to line up in rows, precisely five abreast. The SS, not many in number, impeccably dressed, and accompanied by dogs, ordered some people to the right and some to the left, often with only a flick of a thumb. Some went to the deceptively named “sauna” to be processed, subjected to shavings, tattooings, body inspections, and “disinfection” (Entlausung); others were marched to the gas chamber.⁵⁶ German Jew Lucille Eichengreen, who arrived in August 1944 from Łódź, recalled in her 1994 memoir that it took only ten minutes from leaving the train to entering the “sauna.”⁵⁷

A cacophony of menacing noises thundered on the ramp. With over one thousand people disembarking at once, cries, wailings, shouts, screams, gunfire, and barking all echoed simultaneously. Arriving in May 1944, Czech Jew Cecilie Klein detailed the acoustic maelstrom in her 1988 memoir:

“Raus! Los! Schneller!” (Out! Jump to it! Faster!) the SS men yelled…. With maniacal fury, the SS men hurled the feeble and infirm passengers off the train. They tore infants from their mothers and kicked old people into the dirt. Barking dogs pulled at the loosely-held leashes of vigilante SS officers. An ominous hiss from the train’s engine accompanied the lively melodies of an inmate orchestra. Screams, cries, hissing, music….⁵⁸

Etched in Klein’s memory was Birkenau’s sonorous vortex: SS men yelling in German, children’s cries, beatings, snarling dogs, a rasping train, and untold screams—all to the accompaniment of orchestra music. Such testimony underscores that the platform’s sound panorama was a web of clashing noises that included both the perpetrators’ acoustic assaults and the captives’ “sounds of suffering.”⁵⁹ This multilayered soundscape was “belliphonic,” ethnomusicologist Martin Daughtry’s term to describe the “agglomeration of sounds” that reverberated in Iraq during the war in Iraq.⁶⁰ Although Daughtry largely conceives of the belliphonic as military sounds, his notion of a multisonorous acoustic environment helps to conceptualize the totality of the Auschwitz-Birkenau soundscape, which rang with a spectrum of noises, unleashed in rapid succession and reverberating discordantly. While this essay dissects the individual sounds, the noises rarely rang in isolation. Indeed, deportees experienced the soundscape as a wholesale sonic onslaught that battered them all at once, and although each sound could petrify, the compounding impact of the divergent noises intensified the existential terror that most arrivals felt as they stood on the concourse.

Acoustic assaults unleashed

The guards’ sounds on the concourse functioned as acoustic assaults. Informed by survivor testimony and scholarly research, this paper defines acoustic assaults as sonic violence deployed as brutal force by perpetrators to subdue their targets by instilling fear through sound. This definition emphasizes four key aspects. First, acoustic assaults are violence in and of themselves. Second, they are coercive political tools that perpetrators deploy to terrorize their targets. Third, they are imbued with a force that assails the victims. Finally, the somatosensory afflictions caused by acoustic assaults immobilize the targets, as many become cognitively paralyzed, overtaken by a feeling of numbness.

As the above definition propounds, acoustic assaults are weapons. While they frequently occur in conjunction with physical attacks, they are not by-products of violence, for blaring noises alone cause somatic and psychological harm independent of physical molestation.⁶¹ Historically, noise has been brandished to inflict physical and psychological distress. For example, investigating the Israeli Air Force’s utilization of sonic bombs in the Gaza Strip in 2005, philosopher Steve Goodman shows that the acoustic violence terrorized civilians. According to Goodman, the alarm that Palestinians felt from the sonic bombs was no less palpable than fear generated by conventional weapons. Their fright, he reasons, was “induced purely by sound effects.”⁶²

On the Auschwitz-Birkenau concourse, the use of dogs trained to attack the arrivals illustrated how threatening noises functioned as violence. Survivors consistently noted the presence of vicious dogs, some of which were reportedly trained to strike upon hearing the word “Jew” (Jude).⁶³ While deportees undoubtedly feared being mauled by dogs, the barking also petrified them. Ernest Michel described how the growling scared him as the train pulled up to the platform: “I sensed that something was wrong. I heard voices yelling and the train had come to a halt. I heard dogs barking. Angry dogs. Dogs that meant trouble.”⁶⁴ Without even seeing the dogs, Michel felt threatened. To this extent, the barking behaved as sonic violence: the dogs did not have to attack them to inflict harm, for the sound of barking alone was terrorizing. For Michel, the memory of the barking sonically marked his arrival at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

The barking highlights a second quality of acoustic assaults: namely, that perpetrators wield sonic violence to vanquish their targets. To be sure, the Germans’ use of vicious dogs illustrates how they weaponized sound. This postulation underscores that acoustic assaults are inherently political. As historian Bruce Johnson postulates, “Sound is power, unharnessed.”⁶⁵ The Nazi Party certainly understood how sound could be mobilized to consolidate power. As historian Yaron Jean asserts, the Nazis “turned noise and the hearing of it into sources of political power.”⁶⁶ At its killing centers and labor prisons, the regime especially exploited sound as an instrument of power. For instance, the SS used music played by prisoner orchestras to mollify arrivals as they processed to the gas chambers.⁶⁷ In addition, by forcing inmates to sing under extreme coercion, the SS transformed vocal music into a mechanism of torture that destroyed “the deepest core of what it means to be human, depleting prisoners’ final resource for survival,” as historian Juliane Brauer explains.⁶⁸

At Auschwitz-Birkenau, the guards flaunted their power with barking dogs and antisemitic slurs, and they shouted commands to ensure that the operation moved along quickly and orderly. Although many deportees perceived disembarkation as sheer mayhem, the SS choreographed the procedure day in and day out. In a 1983 oral interview, Polish Jew George Vine elucidated: “[O]f course, the situation was much more organized then [sic] it looked to us. Because they knew exactly what they were doing. But to us, it looked like it was chaos.”⁶⁹ Essential to asserting power on the concourse was commanding the soundscape. Slovak Jew Rudolf Vrba, an inmate who was forced to assist in the detraining, chronicled how the SS dominated sonically:

As soon as a transport arrived, it was surrounded by SS men with sub-machine guns, rifles, or heavy bamboo canes. As the dazed victims tumbled out, they were forbidden to speak and about twenty or thirty SS men were detailed to ensure that this rule was observed.

They ran up and down the ragged, shuffling lines, bellowing: “Silence, everybody! This is not a Synagogue! Behave like civilized human beings and you will be treated well. Behave like animals and you will be treated like animals.”⁷⁰

As Vrba’s testified, the SS demanded silence, which quelled the deafening whirlpool that had initially prevailed on the concourse. When their orders were not heeded, the guards imposed silence with brutal force. This maneuver indubitably was an exercise of power, for not only is sounding an exhibition of authority, but so too is silencing.⁷¹ By demanding silence, the guards muted the victims, thereby clearing the platform aurally for their own vocalizations to resound, acoustically signaling their omnipotence.

Among the most menacing acoustic assaults on the platform were antisemitic slurs, which the SS unleashed to degrade the prisoners. A burgeoning body of scholarship on the aurality of race shows not only that racial constructions and race relations are embedded in sound, but also that sound, itself, mediates and performs race. To be sure, racial groups vocalize and hear sounds differently.⁷² Cultural theorist Poppy de Souza’s investigation of Australian football fans’ booing of top athlete and Adnyamathanha man Adam Goodes illustrates how dominant groups weaponize sound to police the racialized “Other.” According to de Souza, football crowds directed “the force of sound” toward indigenous athletes “to humiliate, exclude and to put racialized others in their ‘place.’”⁷³ For the targets, racist noises invade the sensorium. Communication scholars Sachi Sekimoto and Chris Brown’s research on the ways that race is felt somatically and emotionally in contemporary America offers keen insight into the somatosensorial apprehending of race. They postulate that “[m]ultiple senses are engaged to feel race and racial differences, and such embodied multisensory feelings are integral to the social, political, and ideological construction of race.”⁷⁴ Although many Jews did not assume a racial identity, the SS thoroughly racialized them. Scholarship that studies how dominant groups utilize racialized vocal force to subdue targets, and how this racialized sonic violence impacts targeted groups, illuminates the suffering that Jews experienced upon hearing antisemitic vocalizations.

The arrival ramp boomed with severe racist slurs. Romanian Jew Clara Dan recalled in 1982 that upon her arrival in May 1944, the detainees were pummeled with antisemitic attacks: “[A]ll that you heard was verfluchte Juden [damn Jews].”⁷⁵ Arriving in November 1943, Polish Jew David Faber likewise documented the incessant slurs in his 1993 memoir: “‘Get out, you Schweine!’ [pigs].”⁷⁶ The guards similarly brandished ordinary words to degrade the deportees. For many Jews, being referred to as “everything” (alles) rather than “everyone” (alle) especially caused psychic harm, as French Jew Nadine Heflter, who arrived in June 1944, explained in her 1993 memoir: “For the first time, one heard the cry: Alles, raus, this terrible Alles raus that we came to hear so often afterwards and that did not presage anything good. Besides, wasn’t it very derogatory to hear us being called Alles, meaning ‘everything,’ a herd of cattle if one translated the German thought [la pensée] into good French?”⁷⁷ For Jews, hearing racist words, typically yelled at top volume, heralded that the guards saw them as subhuman. Indeed, the racist shouts on the ramp epitomized the dehumanizing strategy at the core of the genocide. Although the physical violence alone could bring the captives to heel, the SS shouted antisemitic locutions to release a menacing force that humiliated. This sonic brutality was undoubtedly a show of power. Through such utterances, the guards strutted their dominance and crushed their victims psychically so that they would comply with the lethal operation.

Verbal assaults strike the fiercest blow when they devolve into pure sonic violence, removed from the information they might intend to transmit. Indeed, the force of ferocious noise, even in the shape of words, can inflict severe pain. Scholars acknowledge that sound discharges an energy that presses upon the body. Musicologist Suzanne Cusick’s research on the United States’s deployment of amplified music against alleged terrorists in its “War on Terror” offers a compelling case study of how seemingly innocuous sounds can be weaponized. When US authorities used deafening music as an instrument of torture, the music degenerated into merciless noises that assailed the targets.⁷⁸ According to Cusick, the blasting music functioned as a sonic weapon that attacked not only the prisoners’ auditory senses, but also their bodies and minds.⁷⁹ In the torturers’ hands, musical sounds were transformed into tools of violence to flaunt power. As Cusick contends, “When music or other sounds are played loudly enough, … its sheer acoustical energy becomes a physical force.” The deafening music “becomes not a metaphor for power, but power itself.”⁸⁰

Cusick’s thesis that torturers unleash the force of noise to subjugate their targets helps one understand the impact of the guards’ booming commands at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Similar to music used in torture, the perpetrators’ blistering words were transformed into sheer sonic violence that both heralded their power and inflicted pain. As literary scholar Steven Connor argues, “The one who barks a demand or screams an insult is using sound as a weapon to effect his will, but the means whereby this is effected is through an assault on sound itself.”⁸¹ Upon disembarkation, the arrivals heard a series of roaring orders: “Get out! Everything out!” (Aussteigen! Alles aussteigen!), “Out! Out! Out!” (Raus! Raus! Raus!), and especially “Fast!” (Schnell!). Deported in May 1944, Marton Adler explained in a 1989 oral interview how the yelling threatened from the second the train doors opened:

[F]inally [they] opened up these doors. That was the most chaotic thing that I could ever—“Schnell! Raus, raus! Schnell, schnell!”—People. They schlepped people off the train, and but, all they hollered was […] [a]ble-bodied men separate and women and children separate—Raus! Schnell! Schnell! Raus!⁸²

As Adler made clear, the detainees were immediately hit with a barrage of piercing commands that instructed them to deboard quickly. Most compelling, each time Adler spoke the German words, his voice grew louder and his tone sharpened, indicating that the sound of the German language had engraved itself in his sensorium. Mimicking the perpetrators’ yelling, Adler’s oral delivery illustrates that repeatedly shouting German words functioned as continuous violent ambient noise to the trauma that had he suffered. With no time to think about the predicament in which he suddenly found himself, Alder, like the hundreds of thousands other stunned deportees, exited the car in great panic to the soundtrack of blistering German commands.

Of all the acoustic assaults that threatened, the ubiquitous sound of “schnell” left the most enduring imprint upon survivors. As Czech Jew Grete Salus, deported in October 1944, recollected in her 1958 memoir, “Schnell, schneller, schneller—it still rings in my ears, this word that from now on hounded us day and night, whipped us on, and never gave us any rest.”⁸³ Numerous survivors drew explicit attention to hearing “schnell” continuously on the platform. Agi Rubin, who arrived in April 1944 from Hungarian territory, explained in a 1984 oral interview: “You don’t have time to think. We were just shoved up very quickly, schnell, schnell, everything was always schnell.”⁸⁴ Such testimony underscored that the SS deployed “schnell” as a weapon to manage the operation. By shouting it, the guards created an artificial sense of urgency to move the captives along rapidly. Survivor and historian Hermann Langbein summarized: “All stages, from detraining to entering the gas chambers, were completed quickly, and the victims were constantly urged forward, which left no time or opportunity for any communication.”⁸⁵

But the word “schnell” was heard as more than a command. Bellowed at top volume, it became detached from its semantic content and functioned as a pure sonic force that battered the detainees. Especially for Jews who did not speak German, the sound of “schnell”— its tone, timbre, intonation, resonance, and rhythm—rang as ferocious, frightening noise.⁸⁶ French Jew Nadine Heftler characterized it as bestial: “We heard the savage cries, ‘Schneller! Schneller!’”⁸⁷ Polish Jew Betty Perkal, who arrived in January 1944, similarly testified in a 1990 interview to the brutal force of: “‘schnell.’ ‘Schneller.’ Running … We couldn’t talk. We were running. Were just running. Everybody was screaming. There was a noise which was unbelievable.” The guards “were saying ‘Schneller, Schneller, Schneller.’ But kids were crying. People were crying. I heard noises. I got deaf.”⁸⁸ Interlocked in a discordant acoustic panorama of competing thundering noises, the sound of “schnell” engulfed the concourse. For Perkal, its aurality, combined with hearing other terrifying noises while being subjected to physical violence, immobilized her. At that moment, her sense of hearing capitulated. She “got deaf,” exemplifying Robert Kraft’s postulation that “unprecedented cruelty” left victims “bereft of understanding.” In such moments, “[r]eflective thought disappears,” and “unguided perception” responds.⁸⁹

The deployment of loudspeakers to transmit orders augmented the oral violence on the concourse. Since the Weimar Republic, the Nazis had used loudspeakers to command public spaces, particularly during the many election cycles in the early 1930s when they mounted loudspeakers on propaganda trucks (Lautsprecherwagen). As Carolyn Birdsall shows, the loudspeakers signaled an effort by the Nazis to seize the streets aurally.⁹⁰ After the establishment of the Third Reich, the Nazis extended their use of amplification to foster community (i.e., Volksgemeinschaft) through collective aural experiences.⁹¹ As Yaron Jean argues, the use of loudspeakers was an explicit exercise in power, for the loudspeaker was an “acoustical tool” that the regime deployed to police citizens.⁹²

On the Auschwitz-Birkenau concourse, loudspeakers marked the Nazis’ continued effort to prevail politically through the sonic. Scholars document the potency of amplification. For example, investigating Canada’s Kingston Prison, cultural geographer Katie Hemsworth argues that amplification created a “sonic dictatorship” that relentlessly attacked prisoners with noises that could not “be silenced” ⁹³ Indeed, booming noises demand to be heard. They exemplify Martin Daughtry’s hypothesis that “[s]ounds are ‘big’ and energetic. They take up more space than us, and they occupy that space dynamically.”⁹⁴ Most importantly, the overwhelming force of amplification enables it to strike targets aggressively.

Swelling with amplified menacing commands, Auschwitz-Birkenau’s ramp proved that blaring noises saturate spaces and overwhelm targets somatically, cognitively, and emotionally. From the moment the deportees detrained, ear-piercing commands from loudspeakers assailed them. Polish Jew Felix Opatowski, who arrived in spring 1943, described in his 2011 memoir how the broadcasted orders induced panic: “When the doors of the cattle cars opened, lights shone on us and we heard a voice shouting in German over a loudspeaker. Then—I’ll never forget this—this voice announced that there were trucks standing by and whoever couldn’t get to a truck would be shot.” The deportees “all jumped down from the train, running, pushing each other. Everybody wanted to get to those trucks.”⁹⁵ Lucille Eichengreen similarly documented the pernicious energy of the transmitted orders: “Loudly amplified commands assaulted our ears. ‘Raus, schnell, hurry, line up!’ There was a frightening urgency to those German commands, and we hurriedly climbed out of the cars.”⁹⁶ As these testimonies illustrated, the amplified voices were, indeed, “big and energetic.” They engulfed the concourse with a dynamic sonic force that colonized the platform’s space and sent the arrivals into panic. Even more sinister, the amplified commands were heard as gargantuan disembodied roars that expanded the perpetrators’ presence far beyond their material bodies. This interpretation affirms literary theorist Elaine Scarry’s thesis that “ultimate domination requires that the prisoner’s ground become increasingly physical and the torturer’s increasingly verbal, that the prisoners become a colossal body with no voice and the torturer a colossal voice … with no body.”⁹⁷ The amplified voices also heightened the captives’ fear, summed up in a 1982 oral interview by Romanian Jew Anne Eisenberg, who arrived in May 1944: “One cannot imagine how petrifying that place was. The screams were unbelievable. The Germans with their shouts, ‘a Rau…a [sic] Raus, Raus!’”⁹⁸ Overwhelmed by the blasted urgent commands, many Jews sank rapidly into a state of degradation, becoming a mass of humans whose voices had been aggressively silenced. Slovak Jew Simcha Unsdorfer, who spent three weeks at Birkenau in fall 1942, reflected in 1961 on the sensory assault’s impact: “Everyone without exception lost both nerves and senses.” The SS “had set out to break our morale, to wipe away every trace of human feeling, to drive fear, dread, and panic into us. The spine-chilling terror infused in us at the very moment of our arrival never left us.”⁹⁹ It was at this terminus, the point when the detainees were plunged into pure sonic violence, that their bodies and minds often succumbed.

Feeling acoustical assaults

An investigation of the ways that the SS deployed sound to subjugate the arrivals raises critical questions about the nature of power during the Holocaust. Sociologist Wolfgang Sofsky’s notion of “absolute power” lends insight into the operations of power at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Sofsky contends that violence is the nucleus of genocidal power: “[A]bsolute power is sheer violence. It demonstrates its overwhelming might by manifest violence.”¹⁰⁰ Examining the Germans’ weaponization of music, musicologist Morag Grant similarly draws attention to ways that the SS performed power through rituals of violence, especially forced singing.¹⁰¹ Both scholars argue that the regime’s exhibitions of power were intended to destroy the captives’ subjectivity. On the Auschwitz-Birkenau ramp, the guards likewise wielded sonic violence to subjugate prisoners. This practice underscores the third quality of acoustic assaults: namely, that acoustic assaults discharge a force that batters the victims somatically, cognitively, and emotionally, as it palpitates zealously through the body.

Loud noises—those that exceed seventy decibels—cause corporeal damage beyond the cochlea itself. Booming sounds activate stress hormones that raise the heart rate and blood pressure, triggering a host of complex physiological movements and causing somatosensorial damage.¹⁰² To be sure, sonic violence “produces an inescapable sensory overload” within the auditors, as media scholar Michael Bull and sociologist Les Back maintain.¹⁰³ Even when blasted noises masquerade as words or music, they can inflict severe corporeal harm¹⁰⁴ and undermine cognitive acuity.¹⁰⁵ Martin Daughtry’s research on the United States’s deployment of sonic weapons during the Iraq War documents acoustic violence’s debilitating effects, which attacked bodies usually “before any tactical judgment or meaningful interpretation could possibly be made.”¹⁰⁶ In other words, loud noises “make it literally too loud … to think,” and transform targets into “passive bodies, pure victims of vibration.”¹⁰⁷ Suzanne Cusick similarly contends that blaring music behaves as “a vibrating presence of power that can deliver a miraculously ubiquitous battering to the sympathetically vibrating bones and skin of a man, beating him from within and without, while leaving no marks. The victim, she argues, becomes wholly degraded “to a vibrating object with its fingers in its ears.”¹⁰⁸

At the core of acoustic assaults’ capacity to inflict paralytic pain is the fact that sonic violence generally occurs alongside other sensorial attacks. At Auschwitz-Birkenau, the arrivals immediately experienced a host of sensorial violations in rapid succession, bombarding the sensorium all at once and compounding the trauma. This example, underscores the need to situate audial experiences intersensorially. As psychologist Fiona Newell and neuroscientist Ladan Shams explain, “When we perceive the world around us, our phenomenological experience is not of disjointed sensory sensations but is instead of a coherent multisensory world, where sounds, smells, tastes, lights, and touches amalgamate.”¹⁰⁹ At Auschwitz-Birkenau, acoustic assaults merged with the terrifying scenes of beatings and executions, fetid odors, and physical pangs, which sent deportees into shock. For many, the sensory experience was totalizing. It was a brutal embodied ordeal that caused physical pain, affective suffering, and mental incapacitation, affirming psychoanalysts Dori Laub and Andreas Hamburger’s thesis that trauma “put[s] the whole mental apparatus out of commission.”¹¹⁰

Documenting the physiological effects of the arrival ordeal, survivors described how their bodies responded to the thundering noises. Some noted the rush of adrenalin.¹¹¹ Others recalled their hearts pounding, racing, or stopping. In her 2020 memoir, Judy Cohen, who arrived in July 1944 from Debrecen, remembered “man and beast, barking constantly.” The concourse, she declared, was “shocking and disorienting, beyond anything we ever saw or could have imagined. One heart-stopping event followed by another.”¹¹² Some survivors testified that their bodies shook. Deported in June 1943, Polish Jew Abe Korn reflected in his 1999 memoir upon his trembling body amid a full sensory assault:

Our train finally came to a screeching halt.… [W]e were greeted with angry shouts, “Heraus, ihr Hunde!” (Out, you dogs!) Surrounding us were SS guards and officers in their crisp uniforms, aiming their pistols, rifles, and machine guns at us. Some held back police dogs that wanted to tear us apart. Sounds of wailing and shouting filled the air. It was a terrifying spectacle. It had the smell of death, and we trembled with fear.¹¹³

For Livia Bitton-Jackson, it was her stomach that registered fright when she arrived from Hungary in May 1944. As she disclosed in her 1997 memoir, the nausea was directly linked to hearing violent noises: “Dogs snarl, SS men scream orders, children cry, women weep good-byes to departing men, and I struggle with my convulsive stomach.”¹¹⁴ While it is impossible to disentangle the sonic violence from the other causes of the captives’ alarm, including physical attacks, radical social dislocation, and existential dread, the acoustic assaults certainly contributed to the fear that flowed through detainees’ bodies.

Survivors emphasized that the somatosensory afflictions caused by the sonic bombardment manifested the profound distress that palpitated in their bodies. Emotions, as many scholars demonstrate, are felt physically.¹¹⁵ Fear especially presents itself somatically.¹¹⁶ Cultural theorist Sarah Ahmed hypothesizes that the sensation of fear shrinks the body, which recoils from the object of fear.¹¹⁷ Sonic violence especially stokes fear.¹¹⁸ Assailing the body in a multitude of ways, the acoustic assaults at Auschwitz-Birkenau induced an embodied fear that immobilized many detainees, undermining their ability to make sense of the perilous experience and to counter it. Creating such disorientation was precisely the guards’ cardinal objective, for they wielded noise to impair the arrivals’ cognitive faculties so that they would follow commands unquestioningly. In sum, the perpetrators used sonic violence to scare the targets into submission, which is the final characteristic of acoustic assaults.

Throughout the Holocaust, the perpetrators deployed sonic violence as part of a broader strategy to petrify Jews before murdering them. Working in tandem with physical violence, the acoustic violations were intended to destroy subjectivities so that the victims would perish silently. The aim was to crush Jews so thoroughly that they would be transformed into “easy prey for the killers,” as historian Wolfgang Scheffler asserts.¹¹⁹ Fomenting fear prior to execution was a requisite element of this strategy. In his study of the massacres of Jews in Ukraine, Patrick Desbois argues that the terror induced prior to execution was designed to “immobilize thought and awareness, and hinder the ability to remain responsible, confrontational, and strong.”¹²⁰ Sonic violence was pivotal to this comprehensive subjugation. At its labor prisons, for example, the SS harnessed music to crush inmates’ subjectivities, thereby “destroying the person’s self-assurance and robbing the prisoner of an essential force vital to survival,” as Juliane Brauer contends.¹²¹ At Auschwitz-Birkenau, the guards similarly unleashed brutal noises to stun the arrivals so that they would go to their deaths in a relatively orderly fashion.

The capacity of acoustic assaults to stupefy the deportees into compliance with the operation was especially evident during the human sorting process. Immediately after detraining came “selections” (Selektionen), the process of choosing which prisoners would be executed directly and which would be spared immediate death. Typically, the elderly, infirm, and mothers with children were sent to the gas chamber straightaway, while the young and healthy were reserved for slave labor. Survivors consistently testified that they had been caught unawares by the human sorting process, and consequently, many lost sight of loved ones within seconds. In no small measure did the thundering maelstrom contribute to their disorientation. Indeed, most were stunned by the process, particularly because it occurred at lightning speed amid a terrifying sound panorama and physical violence. As Lucille Eichengreen recalled, “Everything was happening so fast that we could not yet discern any pattern or meaning…. There were no good-byes, only screams and broken, bleeding hands.”¹²² Survivors drew explicit attention to how the sounds during family separation contributed to their cognitive stupor. German Jew Ursula Pawel, who arrived in October 1944, recalled in her 2000 memoir how the sonic vortex crippled her:

Tall, uniformed SS in shining leather boots screamed at us: “Leave all luggage in the cars! Get out! Quickly, hurry up!” (“Raus, schnell, schnell, schneller!”) They enforced their barking and screaming with their whips and drawn guns. Vicious German shepherd dogs were held by some SS men on short leases. The dogs were straining to get at us. The SS showered us with vile vulgar insults, they kept shouting commands at us. “Women this way! Men that way! Line up in fives!”…. I obeyed instructions. I felt nothing. I was numb.¹²³

Anne Eisenberg similarly remembered the incapacitating effects of acoustic assaults during family separation: “All of a sudden I hear a shout. ‘Halt.’ I stopped, I froze.”¹²⁴ For Simcha Unsdorfer, it was Josef Mengele’s yelling “Dort bleiben!” (Stay there!) to his parents that paralyzed him, as he was whisked away. In 1961, he reflected on his cognitive impairment: “I had lost them … lost them forever,” and this marked the moment that “my brain refused to work.”¹²⁵ Regina Cohen, who arrived in May 1944, likewise recalled how the guards’ shouting induced paralysis: “I remember being pushed with a, with a gun—with a something um, by a uniform, SS. And uh, ‘Come on. Schnell, schnell, schnell.’” Without thinking, Cohen rushed into line and marched away. Suddenly, she “turned around to look where … my mother is with the younger kids, they were gone.” In a 1982 oral interview, Cohen reflected upon her mental debilitation at that moment: “We were so disoriented from all the travel and we’re confused. And at that point, I have no family with me.”¹²⁶ In that split-second, hearing the guard’s threatening orders prompted Cohen instinctively to run into line, losing her family forever. Fellow Auschwitz-Birkenau inmate Jolly Z. provided insight into Cohen’s experience: “When the selection took place, you probably just think, which way did he say to go, so I’ll go right or left. There are no emotions. There is no observing reaction. There’s just action. The rest comes later.”¹²⁷

Such testimony illustrates that most detainees felt intense perceptual disequilibrium from the multisensorial overload on the platform, which made it difficult for them to respond in the moment of acute crisis. In fact, some captives were so thoroughly traumatized that they felt as though they were “drugged or in a trance,” as Robert Kraft explains.¹²⁸ Survivors and scholars refer to this as arrival or admission “shock.”¹²⁹ Family separation, which haunted many survivors for the rest of their lives, exacerbated both the shock and the painful memory of it.¹³⁰ Szymon Binke, who arrived in 1944 from Łódź, described his shock in a 1997 oral interview: “Pandemonium. Dogs and yelling and screaming, ‘Raus, raus, raus’…. Weren’t thinking. Total shock.”¹³¹ Ernest Michel similarly recalled how the harrowing ordeal anesthetized the captives: “No one spoke. The incessant screams and barking wore us down.… I was totally numb from the cold, the hunger, and the fear. None of us had enough strength to talk.”¹³² Plunged into the merciless din, the deportees became immobilized. Numb, their capacity to resist was severely impaired, and consequently, most silently awaited the next command, which for the majority was a procession to the gas chamber.

Although many prisoners reacted to the terrifying ordeal by quietly heeding orders, others resisted. Especially when they realized that families were being torn asunder, some fought back. Simcha Unsdorfer chronicled such a scene in 1942: “Desperate scenes were developing … amounting to pandemonium. Heartbroken parents clamored to join their ‘selected’ children; young children wanted to hold onto their ‘selected’ fathers. The chaos was indescribable.”¹³³ Unsdorfer testified that the deportees seized the soundscape, instinctively vocalizing resistance:

There were heartbreaking screams and cries, but the shrieks imbued the SS men with more fury. They hammered their rifles indiscriminately over the heads of their victims, they lashed out wildly right and left. Within seconds, unconscious, bleeding bodies lay all over the place. Parents, their faces smothered in blood, still screamed and searched for their children who had been lost in the mad welter of attack.¹³⁴

This account made clear that family separation sometimes sparked tumults in which Jews physically and orally battled to remain with loved ones. Although in this case, their sounds cued the guards to redouble their savagery, the fact that the detainees’ expressions of resistance reverberated on the platform marked the limits of the perpetrators’ ability to control the sonic environment as well as the entire operation.

Besieged audially and somatically, deportees’ rational faculties were sometimes so severely compromised that they could apprehend the sensory onslaught only unconsciously. Grete Salus narrated her own transmutation: “As soon as we jumped out of the railroad car, we were engulfed and, half unconscious, floated along toward something horrible that we could only sense deep in our subconscious.”¹³⁵ Reflecting in 1958 on her arrival experience, Salus drew attention to how images had flashed by so rapidly that she was unable cognitively to process the events. “Now everything unfolded with breathtaking speed. Only some of it remained fixed, like flash photography, but everything else did not penetrate into our consciousness.”¹³⁶ Salus’s submergence into the unconscious was congruous with the horrific nature of the ordeal, for the most consequential damage that sensory assaults inflict often lies beyond consciousness.¹³⁷ Betty Perkal’s arrival experience epitomized the descent into the unconscious. Engulfed in the violent roaring soundscape, Perkal became wholly incapacitated, as terror seized her body. “At some stage, I heard myself screaming. I didn’t know what happened to myself. I screamed like…. I don’t know why, what. It came from you, like unconscious and everybody was screaming.”¹³⁸ Perkal interpreted her screaming as an unconscious primordial response to the existential threat that had been unleashed on the concourse.¹³⁹ She believed that in that second, she had lost self-control, including governance over the sounds that she had emitted; and so, she let out screams. Overwhelmed by the multiple simultaneous corporeal attacks, the deportees had little time and few psychological tools to navigate the ordeal, as the sonic violence, combined with the physical assaults, undermined their ability to listen clearly and to think lucidly. Their responses in this moment of acute crisis were, as Steve Goodman reasons, largely affective and “libidinal.”¹⁴⁰

Elaine Scarry’s hypothesis that torture incapacitates targets cognitively offers important insight into the psychological afflictions that many deportees felt. Scarry postulates that wounds caused by physical torture inundate victims so thoroughly that they can only feel pain and are single-mindedly preoccupied with ending it.¹⁴¹ As the victim’s body balloons under pain, it extirpates one’s sense of self. Tortured at Fort Breendonk in Belgium in July 1943, resistance fighter Austrian Jean Améry meditated upon his injuries in 1966: “Whoever is overcome by pain through torture experiences his body as never before. In self-negation, his flesh becomes a total reality.” Améry elaborated: “The tortured person is only a body, and nothing else beside that.”¹⁴² Descending into the corporeal, the victim is psychically shattered. At Auschwitz-Birkenau, many Jews suffered afflictions akin to torture. The beatings, executions, and family separation combined with the barking, shouted commands, and antisemitic slurs were experienced as multisensorial attacks that conspired to deepen distress. In those moments of painful sensory overload, many deportees focused on survival, as Ernest Michel reflected: “The hunger and fatigue were gone. This was strictly a matter of survival.”¹⁴³ Within minutes, the SS had transformed the captives into primordial beings who responded subconsciously, taking flight from the rains of beatings, the horrific sights, and the acoustic assaults. Reacting to the “unrelenting mortal threat,” they had reached the stage, as Robert Kraft postulates, at which “primitive schemas for survival” were essential.¹⁴⁴

That the deportees responded instinctively to the terrifying ordeal was illustrated by the experience of a Hungarian physician who was separated from her two- and four-year-old. Following a Sonderkommando’s urging, the mother handed her children over to an older woman. The physician recounted the events to fellow inmate Grete Salus. She disclosed that the Sonderkommando “wanted to save my life, and I, I the mother, did it. Nothing had warned me, and I abandoned my children.” She believed that “my motherly-instinct left me—I left my poor child alone in this horror. A mother left her children alone to die, and that’s me.” Profoundly tormented by her split-second decision, the woman lamented, “And I live. Can I really live with this guilt? I say to myself, can I really live?”¹⁴⁵ Rife with discordant sounds reverberating simultaneously—the Sonderkommando urging her to save her own life and her son begging her not to abandon him—this episode defies a prima facie reading. On the one hand, the mother maintained that she did not understand the implications of hearing the Sonderkommando’s words: “‘Nothing had warned me,” she insisted. On the other hand, she stated that her son was overcome with such unbounded fear that he repeatedly implored her, “Mommy, you will not leave me alone?”¹⁴⁶ At some level, the mother acknowledged that she had turned a deaf ear to her son. But the mother faced an impossible battle of instincts: “motherly instinct” versus survival. In Salus, she found a sympathetic confidant, as Salus explicated the woman’s intractable quandary: “In a normal situation [Atomsphäre], without extraordinary demands on your body and mental [seelische] power of resistance, maybe you wouldn’t have held out. But in this life, the body fought independently, without getting permission to do so.”¹⁴⁷  In extremis, the body battled on its own, superseding the rational mind. For the mother, the arrival ordeal was a fully embodied experience, rooted in a soundscape of competing incomprehensible noises: the Sonderkommando’s instructions to turn over her children colliding with her son’s terrified pleas. She also likely heard a host of other noises: screams, thundering commands, antisemitic slurs, barking dogs, and gunshots. While the mother subsequently attempted to comprehend the events, the mind provided no solace to the trauma that had burrowed itself sonically into her body.

Conclusion

The Auschwitz-Birkenau concourse was a dynamic acoustic environment in which interlocking conflicting noises swelled and contracted in conjunction with the arrival operation. When the train doors opened, frenzied commands, antisemitic slurs, barking, beatings, and gunshots immediately besieged the deportees. The SS tactically deployed sonic violence to manage the process. The chief objective was to instill terror so that the prisoners would comply with the genocidal procedure. Overwhelmed by the sudden perceptual avalanche, the frightened, disorientated arrivals released their own anguished outpourings. For a few minutes, the guards permitted some utterances to be sounded, but quickly, they demanded silence, deploying physical and acoustic assaults to achieve quietude in preparation for family separation, which typically catalyzed another flood of outbursts.

The prisoners’ oral paroxysms manifested trauma induced by the sonic violence, physical molestations, the frenetic pace of disembarkation, and family separation. This ordeal produced such acute sensory shock that it dulled one’s ability to respond to the multisensory attacks that pummeled them all at once. Acoustic assaults were key ingredients in this comprehensive system of degradation, for the sonic bombardment reverberated so loudly in the victims’ ears and bodies that it undermined their ability to think. Deportees became cognitively paralyzed, often reacting unconsciously. Instinctively, some could only manage to run into line or to let out a scream. Such mental immobilization at that moment marked the captives’ shattered subjectivities, which seared themselves into their embodied memories.

Sara Ann Sewell is a professor of modern European cultural and gender history at Virginia Wesleyan University. Her current research investigates Holocaust victims’ experiences, focusing on their audial, sensorial, and emotional lives. Publications include “‘The Whole Language Was a Scream.’: The German Language during the Seizures of Jews,” in A Companion to Sound Studies in German-Speaking Cultures (2023), and “Sonic Experiences in the Night: The Case of the Falling Bunk at Auschwitz-Birkenau,” in New Microhistorical Approaches to an Integrated History of the Holocaust (2023). She also researches communism in interwar Germany, focusing on everyday life, gender, and political culture. Her publications include “‘Rächen. Nicht trauern.’ Deutsche kommunistisch-antifaschistische Trauerkultur, 1931–1932,” Arbeit–Bewegung–Geschichte. Zeitschrift für historische Studien (2022) and “Antifascism in the Neighborhood: Daily Life, Political Cultural, and Gender Politics in the German Communist Antifascist Movement, 1930–1933,” Fascism. Journal of Comparative Fascist Studies (2020). She is also a co-author of Ruptures in the Everyday: Views of Modern Germany from the Ground (2017).

Footnotes