Sonic Topographies of the Treblinka Extermination Camp

After the Wannsee Conference, the mechanism for the mass murder of European Jewry shifted from the mass shootings of the Einsatzgruppen to the concentration camp system. While the Einsatzgruppen perpetuated musical sadism against their victims as another form of psychological torture, what was the role of music and sound in the camps? How can we use sound to understand the experience of a camp like Treblinka, with limited testimony and a destroyed space as a memorial? Sound, unlike music, contributes to a complete experiential and spatial picture of the camp. The soundscape of Treblinka included the clanking of an excavator, the crackling of a fire, a trumpet call as a signal, and even an orchestra playing pre-war tunes in a new and traumatic way, in addition to sounds like gunshots or screams, which are inherently traumatic. For camp residents who survived the initial selection, sound was a prominent feature of the testimony, reinforcing the terror and trauma of imprisonment. Among the testimonies from Treblinka, sound is a recurring motif that marks time and events in the camp, associated with extraordinary brutality and horror, and exceptionally linked to the sadism of Kurt Franz, the third commandant and an equal lover of music and sadism.

For the perpetrators, sound created a hierarchical reinforcement of identity. Franz's desire to 'prove himself' in the management of death and destruction at Treblinka was paralleled culturally, where he sought to present a macabre musical spectacle, camaraderie events for himself and other soldiers, and the formation of his own band. Franz's music was a fusion of ego and sadism that permeated all aspects of camp order. Combining an affective reading of the testimonies with a spatial analysis of Treblinka reveals that Franz and other perpetrators didn't use music to mediate genocide, but rather music was used to reinforce it.

A sonic understanding of Treblinka from testimony thus reveals the prisoners' experience of the camp. Violent sounds are prioritised and ubiquitously mentioned in the testimonies, even when the survivors have no particular reason to emphasise them. Sonic artefacts may be unique to prisoners - the digging of graves or the crackling of cremation pits may have been inconspicuous or overlooked by the perpetrators. The disorienting nature of sound, sadism and torture contributed to the brutality and horror of the camp. In the chaos of Treblinka, some sounds were deliberately sadistic, such as the forced music of Kurt Franz, but the pervasive violent ordinary sound of the camp also served to constantly disorient and psychologically return prisoners to a soundscape of mass murder - a new condition of total violent sound that Alexandra Birch calls Total Violence Sounds. How was this sound world organised, and how did the SS oversee the sonic torture?

One misconception about Treblinka is that the orchestra, Franz’s personal ensemble led by violinist Arthur Gold, was somehow intended to ‘cover the screams of the victims’ or that the music somehow concealed the genocide. Rather, the deliberate making of music was for the benefit of the Germans, so that

“God forbid, they should not be removed from their native culture in this out-of-the-way spot. Now I could ascertain that their concern for musical culture was even greater.”^[2]

It is indeed sonically impossible that the three musicians playing non-amplified instruments outside would be heard along the long path leading between Treblinka I, the arrival camp, and Treblinka II where this gas chamber was.  Abram Kolski specifically remembered his arrival to Treblinka:

“The music we had later, and even when we would have music, nobody would hear the music there. The screaming was from the ramp.”^[3]

The musicians, a band of three, stood forty metres from the gas chambers and "played enthusiastically, it was difficult to make out their repertoire... these were apparently the latest hits favoured by the Germans and Ukrainians. "^[4] Prisoners carrying a corpse were ordered to "sing something with gusto" - the sadism and enthusiasm around death was the point of the entertainment, not the musical specificity of the song.^[5] Prisoners sang or played with enthusiasm or gusto in order to continue to survive, to exercise sadism "correctly" for their tormentors, lest they face greater physical punishment for not being humorous enough. In this musical sadism of the camp we see the institutionalisation of the clandestine musical sadism of the Einsatzgruppen. The musicians played constantly, and music was an integral part of the parodic spectacles and even of the roll call. For one thing, the music would not have made it as far as the arrival ramps through the woods and would have gone completely unnoticed in the panic of arrival. The screams were not confined to the area near the gas chambers, but were a "sound that could be heard for miles", from the arrival platforms to the lazarett execution sites to the gas chambers.^[6] Yankiel Wiernik also recalled that the screams from the gas chambers could be clearly heard from Treblinka I and were in no way covered by other sounds.^[7]

Music was for the entertainment of the perpetrators, and when screams and terror merged with the music, it only added to the value and mockery of the entertainment, rather than covering up the murder. Music in the gas chambers also accompanied other sadistic entertainment for the guards, who could watch the mass deaths unfold over about twenty-eight minutes through a reinforced window.^[8] Sometimes prisoners were ordered to sing German folk songs before death.[9] In the gas chambers in winter, the perpetrators "drank and watched naked women waiting outside in -20ºC. The commandant ordered a Ukrainian to fetch him a large bottle of cognac from the mess."^[10] Here we see a conflation of murderous Nazi bacchanalia - a German overseeing the gas chambers, the specific observation of women and gender violence, and the whole scene underpinned by alcohol and background music. Arguably, music was part of this psychologically altered state - an entertainment forced on the prisoners and staged for the benefit of the perpetrators. Music is not benign, but an important and dangerous tool, like alcohol. The proximity of death was another part of the male bonding ritual with alcohol and musical camaraderie.

If the logistical concern was pacifying victims, other indicators between the arrival ramps and the long walk to the gas chambers would have immediately indicated genocidal intent. As prisoners disembarked “with growing dread, the passengers became aware of alarming signs all around them: a hastily swept square, random personal belongings, and no continuing trains.”^[11] Survivors recount the constant screaming at night, the overpowering smell at arrival, the smoke pouring out of immolation pits, and building-sized piles of clothing and later of the dead at arrival. ^[12]

Gesamtgewalttätigklänge

Scholar Terrence Des Pres described the pervasive and dehumanizing filth of the concentration camp system as an “Excremental Assault” on prisoners.^[13] Transcending merely the physical needs of individuals, the term also creates an immediate, visceral understanding of space – the carceral interaction with pervasive smell, filth, death, and sensorial trauma. Relentless sound is a lingering sense like smell and is a brutal and obliterating way to control and manipulate prisoners.^[14] More than simply a ‘soundscape’, sound in Treblinka was comprised of many Gesamtgewalttätigklänge: totalizing, violent sounds that were ceaseless, permeating, and traumatic. With the relatively small physical space of the camp, sound from the excavator used for exhumation and burial, gunshots, screams, laughter, and music could likely be heard from all areas of the camp. More than simply an immersive experience, these sounds, in other contexts could be quotidian but here were specifically traumatic. Sound provides insight into the sensorial experiences of the camp, from arrival to murder. It also has possibilities to be terrifying, modify a mentality, and be obfuscating like euphemistic language.

The permeating nature of sound is reflected in testimony and how pervasive ordinary sounds are in the sensory descriptions of the camp. Sound seeped from one part of the camp to the other, with screams heard from the gas chambers in Treblinka I, and an ever-present sonic terror like the lingering smell of death which hung in the air. The clearest trauma of sound is that which is explicitly violent. Willenberg describes the “sounds of death” at the immolation pits with graphic sonic descriptions akin to violent imagery: “The sizzling, half-burnt cadavers emitted grinding and cracking sounds.”^[15] The cracking of thousands of bones immediately conjures the entire sensorial experience of death and immolation, a horror unerasable from the sonic memory. He likens sound and the movement of earth saying, “a little later, the ground covering the pits [began] to shake from the explosions caused by fermenting bodies.”^[16] Traumatic sounds don’t only include explicit sounds of violence like gunshots or screams. He draws on a horrifying sensorial experience rooted in sound rather than sight or smell as the center of his testimony. The cracking and grinding bodies of the dead and tumultuously, independently moving earth equals or exceeds any expected traumatic sound like a gunshot. There is something totalizing about this sound that would have combined with other senses, like smell. There is also a reanimated cast to the dead in this sonic imagination – although voiceless, the dead individuals in immolation emitted sound and a sensorial interaction with the Sonderkommando and survivors of the camp. Other pervasive violent sounds worth considering are the massive diesel excavator brought in to dig mass graves, machinery so emblematic to the camp that survivors like Chil Rajchman personified and gave the machine a “voice” in his testimony. The barking of dogs or sounding of whistles indicated new arrivals and created violent demarcations of the day for prisoners.

The soundscape of Treblinka is also worth careful consideration. With the complete destruction of the camp, and limited photographic and archaeological evidence of the site, sound from testimony helps reconstruct the experience of the camp and the spatial interactions with prisoners. The Gesamtgewalttätigklang, is not only the sound of screaming or death or gunshots, but a subtle reconsideration of sounds which are not inherently violent: the crackle of a fire, the tenor of an engine, the blast of a train horn, or even the jovial dance music of an orchestra. Sound can become violent in context – the ominous crackle of a fire burning bones and families rather than wood, or the cheerful party music of the interwar merging with screams from diesel gas chambers watched enthusiastically by the SS. The demarcation of time also as indicated sonically, with train blasts for example, snaps prisoners back to the reality of their horrifying tasks and the endless tortures of their time in the camp.

By Alexandra Birch

For a more complete analysis, please see: Chapter 4 (“Treblinka: A Forest Portal to Hell) in, Alexandra Birch, Hitler’s Twilight of the Gods: Music and the Orchestration of War and Genocide in Europe (University of Toronto Press, 2024).

Sources

1. Suzanne G.Cusick, "Music as torture/Music as weapon," In The Auditory Culture Reader, pp. 379-391. Routledge, 2020.
2. Abraham Kszepicki, “Treblinka,” in Biuletyn Zydowskiego Instytutu Historycznego, Czerwicz, no. 43-44, 1962, 103.
3. Abram Kolski USC VHA Interview.
4. Yitzhak Arad (Yitzhak Arad, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka: The Operation Reinhard Death Camps (Bloomington, IN: University of Indiana Press, 1987) p. 86) mentions that the orchestra was “to drown out the victims’ screams on the way to the gas chambers so they would not be heard throughout the camp” but it is directly refuted by the testimony of Kszepicki who he quotes and other testimonies of arrival at Treblinka.
5. Willenberg, Surviving Treblinka, 119.
6. Beno Bernari, Interview 1418, Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation, March 15 1995, accessed September 6, 2022.
7. Auerbach, “In the Fields of Treblinka,” 35.
8. SS Concentration camp officer testimony, 2014.446.1 postwar testimony (Hanna Marx, Hartford Conn)
9. Grossman, Treblinskii Ad, 14.
10. Chil Rajchman testimony, microfiche, p. 40.
11. Grossmann, Treblinskii Ad, 5.
12. Kszepicki, “Eighteen Days in Treblinka,” 85.
13. Terrence Des Pres, The Survivor: An Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2007), 57.
14. Ian E. J. Hill. Not Quite Bleeding from the Ears: Amplifying Sonic Torture, Western Journal of Communication, 76:3, 2012, 217-235, Accessed July 6, 2022, DOI: 10.1080/10570314.2011.652287.
15. Willenberg, Surviving Treblinka, 60.