Jewish New Year’s Card depicting Street singer Jankiel Herszkowicz. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Joseph Wajsblat.
Listening to the sounds of persecution
Hearing Herszkowicz’s satirical and ascerbic performances referencing political and everyday realities of life under Nazi occupation was part of ghetto street life in Lodz. The songs performed by him entered ghetto culture, and were referenced in first-person accounts, the Ghetto’s official Chronicle and documents such as this postcard. USHMM Photograph Number: 59782 https://collections. ushmm.org/search/ catalog/pa1148188
The Jewish population of Eastern Europe were subjected to relentless persecution during the Second World War. What did this persecution sound like? Researchers are analysing references to sounds in diaries, contemporary reports and post-war reports from survivors to build a deeper picture, as Professor Christian Gerlach explains. The Jewish population
Anti-Jewish persecution By analysing texts, the group hope to shed new light on the nature of anti-Jewish persecution during the conflict. Researchers in the project aim to identify references to specific sounds in written texts, focusing on three main
60
types of documents. “We work on the basis of written documents. One type is diaries; here you find references to everyday sounds. Then you also have post-war survivor reports, in which the sounds of everyday life are not very prominent but which focus on dramatic scenes. The third group of texts we are looking at is contemporary reports, that mainly deal
Sounds can tell us about things such as social relations, social order, and power hierarchies, as well as collective action, cultural difference and religious practice. with public life,” says Gerlach. These accounts detail not only sounds associated with violence and war, but also how people communicated and behaved at a time when their lives often depended on their ability to avoid detection, for example if they were in hiding from the occupiers. “This is very much about being on the alert, about being suspicious and always listening carefully,” continues Gerlach. “In one of the sub-projects, Nikita Hock looks at hiding places.”
A hiding place may have only been used for a short period of time before people felt they had to move on, while in other cases people may have stayed in the same location for months or even years at a time. This in itself presented challenges, among which were everyday bickering or often simply boredom. “Boredom is psychologically dangerous. Because when you are bored you can start to do stupid things,” says Gerlach, summing up Hock’s findings. The nature of the hiding place also affected how people conducted themselves. “Underground shelters had special acoustic qualities – you couldn’t be heard very well from outside, you were pretty isolated. That meant you could have a relatively normal life, you could wash your dishes, talk, some people could even sing. On the other hand, you wouldn’t be able to hear when somebody approached,” says Gerlach. “The situation in an attic hiding place was completely different. There you were much more exposed, and every move that you made could give you away.” The main threat to those hiding in these locations was denunciation, so it was important that as few people as possible knew they were there. The situation in ghettoes, where huge numbers of people were confined together in small areas, is a major topic of interest in Janina Wurbs’ sub-project. “One of the things we’re interested in is singing. Singers are interesting because this tells us about tensions within
EU Research
Social history This project overall is a scholarly undertaking, with Gerlach and his colleagues aiming to contribute to a social history of violence and persecution through sound history. One aspect
of Gerlach’s research involves investigating the role of mass media in inciting ethnic, racial or religious hatred. “The radio is acoustically the most interesting. In my studies on Jewish survivors of Nazi persecution, I found very few mentions of radio propaganda. I also looked in a comparative sense into other situations of mass violence, such as the mass killings in Indonesia in the ‘60s, where the same is true,” he says. This approach could allow researchers to put their findings on Nazi Germany into a broader context, yet the primary focus in the project is on anti-Jewish persecution during the Second World War, with Christoph Dieckmann’s subproject focusing on survivor reports from the post-war period. “This sub-project will be, more than the others, about issues of narrative and memory,” continues Gerlach. One of the key points to emerge from the project is that references to sounds become more frequent in the narrative during periods of transition or crisis, in particular the sound of steps. “The nature of these sounds is very interesting, because it tells you something about the system,” says Gerlach. German police and the SS devoted a lot of energy to looking through buildings in search of people who were in hiding, but they often did so in pairs or even alone, so they had a high degree of autonomy. “On most occasions the police functioned as they were supposed to, pulling people out of their hiding places and bringing them to designated locations,” outlines Gerlach. “Only in a tiny number of cases did they pretend to overlook the people who they found. We can learn more about this autonomy of action and how it was made use of by enquiring into what survivors said about the sounds that they heard.”
Sounds of antiJewish persecution Sound production and aural experience during the Holocaust Project Objectives
The project aims to contribute to the history of the Holocaust by analysing written evidence of sounds from the period in diaries, reports and post-war accounts. Sound history is a relatively young field, and has not been widely applied in the study of persecution, so researchers hope that this approach will help shed new light on the period. Sounds reflect social conditions and relations, and so can open up new insights into how Jewish people and communities dealt with persecution, and the nature of the persecution they were subjected to.
Project Funding
Funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation
Contact Details
Project Coordinator, Christian Gerlach Universität Bern Historisches Institut Länggassstrasse 49 3012 Bern Schweiz T: +41 31 631 50 88 E: christian.gerlach@hist.unibe.ch W: http://soundscapesoftheshoah.org/ W: https://www.hist.unibe.ch/forschung/ forschungsprojekte/sounds_of_anti_jewish_ persecution/index_ger.html Christoph Dieckmann Nikita Hock Janina Wurbs © © ManuelMiethe
of Eastern Europe suffered terrible German-organized persecution in the Second World War, during which huge numbers of people were confined to ghettos and murdered in camps or shot. The sounds that marked this period of history can tell us much about the nature of this persecution, a topic central to Christian Gerlach’s work as the Principal Investigator of a new research project based at the University of Berne (SNF project 172597). “The original, fairly simple question was; ‘what did this persecution sound like?’” he outlines. This represents a relatively neglected aspect of the historiography of the Holocaust, yet analysis of written evidence of the sounds heard at the time can help researchers uncover more detail about the nature of anti-Jewish persecution, believes Gerlach. “Sounds can tell us about things such as social relations, social order, and power hierarchies, as well as collective action, cultural difference and religious practice. They can help us learn about conflict, violence, and gender roles,” he explains.
the ghetto,” Gerlach explains. The ghettoes in Warsaw, Łódź and other locations were places of extreme scarcity and hunger, as well as other social problems, issues that some singers touched on in their music. “Some of these songs were about the lack of food and hunger, but also about inequality,” continues Gerlach. “Wurbs’ sub-project is looking at certain social situations, for example street begging and soup kitchens, and the sounds associated with them. These big ghettoes were very crowded – for example, the Warsaw ghetto covered an area of around 4 km2, with a population of about 400,000 people.” Evidence suggests the main sounds that were audible in the ghetto came from human voices and music, rather than technology. There is however relatively little evidence of collective action amongst the population, despite so many people being crammed together in a confined space. “There’s very little evidence of people marching, of funeral processions or political demonstrations,” says Gerlach. There is also little to suggest that collective acoustic alarm systems were established within ghettoes, to try and warn Jewish people of a specific threat. “Drums, trumpets, bells or other signals were not used to raise the alarm. Communities usually had not agreed on specific acoustic signals to raise the alarm. This didn’t really change much, even as the persecution progressed,” explains Gerlach. “The German occupying forces tried to prevent the use of such signals, while to some extent people were in denial about the threat that they faced.”
Dr Christoph Dieckmann taught Modern European History at Keele University, UK, and researched Yiddish Historiography on the Russian Civil War at the Fritz Bauer Institut in Frankfurt am Main. His study on the German Occupation Policy in Lithuania 1941-1944 was awarded the Yad Vashem International Book Prize for Holocaust Research in 2012. Nikita Hock is a doctoral candidate at the University of Bern. He studied Jewish and Religious Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin, as well as Cultural Theory and History at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. His doctoral project examines the experience and depiction of sound in Jewish war-time diaries. Janina Wurbs is a doctoral candidate at the University of Bern. She holds an MA in Jewish Studies and History; a specialist in Yiddish language and culture, she has published in major Yiddish newspapers and magazines as well as Yiddish radio. Her book „Generationenübergreifender Jiddischismus“ came out in 2018.
A bunker used by Jews for hiding during the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, April-May 1943. Yad Vashem Photo Archives 2807/3 From a report filed by General Jürgen Stroop, the SS officer who commanded the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, April-May 1943. Copyright © 2020 Yad Vashem. The World Holocaust Remembrance Center
www.euresearcher.com
61