Sounds of Suffering on Deportation Trains

In April 1943, thirteen-year-old Halina Birenbaum was taken to Majdanek during the final dismantling of Warsaw Ghetto. In 1967, she documented the wretched conditions inside the freight car. Jews suffered from the dearth of space, fresh air, water, and food. The car was strewn with the deceased, many of whom had been trampled to death. Birenbaum, herself, became entangled in a mound of bodies. Suffocating, she torturously climbed out of the pile:  

And then the invincible will to live awoke in me, the will to extricate myself from the inert bodies pressing down upon me.

I began struggling with this enormous weight. With a kind of insane, purely animal strength, I struggled until I finally reached the surface.

Birenbaum’s near-death experience was accompanied by a cacophony of horrific noises:

‘The train moved off amidst incessant shrieks, cries and rifle shots [….] People were quarrelling and fighting over every inch of space.’ Some people ‘raged,’ while others prayed.

Meanwhile, the ‘rattle of the wheels’ lured Birenbaum into a torpor, as earlier conversations echoed in her head:

My mother assured me we were on the way to a labour camp, and none of us was in any danger. This was just what I wanted to hear, but David Kaplan stood continually before my eyes, talking about the murder of Jews in Treblinka [...] Then everything grew confused; the noise of the train, the shrieks in the wagon, my mother's words, the sinister thoughts and my fear of Treblinka. My head reeled and I plunged into an abyss.

Birenbaum hazily recollected her mother’s murmurs as she attempted to resuscitate her daughter:

‘The faint voice of my mother […] barely reached my ears. She was certainly trying to bring me back to consciousness, but I could no longer catch the meaning of her words.’

Birenbaum’s testimony sheds light on the profound suffering aboard the deportation trains. Both she and the other prisoners were afflicted with a host of sensory assaults: violations of touch in the packed cars, a compromised sense of sight under the cover of darkness, unbearable stench, excruciating heat, unquenchable thirst, and threatening gunshots. They were also pained by the continuous sounds of suffering expressed by the other captives. Indeed, the cars continuously reverberated with screams, cries, quarrels, and forlorn prayers. These anguished utterances aurally documented the emotional impact of the Holocaust. But the sounds also affectively injured the auditors. Examining the sounds of suffering that reverberated inside the wagons, this essay explores the experience of hearing train sounds, focusing on Jews’ emotional worlds aboard the locomotives.

SOUND AND EMOTION

‘Feelings make history,’ declared historian Ute Frevert, summing up the findings of the significant research on people’s affective lives in various historical epochs. Recently, scholars have begun to examine Jews’ emotions in the Holocaust, demonstrating that affect was at the heart of their experiences. This essay in part of this new research. It specifically knits together the fields of sound studies, sensory studies, and the history of emotions to explore Jews’ affective lives aboard deportation trains.   

There is a large interdisciplinary body of scholarship that investigates the intricate relationship between sound and emotions. Researchers generally agree that most sounds are sonic signatures of affective life. From laughing to screaming, the noises that humans emit give access to their emotional states of being. But sound wields more power than simply registering feelings, for sound, itself, has the capacity to move people affectively. In other words, when humans hear sounds, they often respond emotionally. This is one of music, media, and cultural studies scholar Steve Goodman’s central theses. Exploring the ways that wartime sounds generated fear, Goodman postulates that sound shapes ‘the way populations feel’ at both the individual level and in the collective.

Aboard the deportation trains, Jews heard a constant soundtrack of anguished utterances from their fellow prisoners. The auditors, thus, became earwitnesses to others’ trauma. The concept of earwitness was initially advanced by composer and sound studies pioneer R. Murray Schafer in his 1977 seminal study The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World. Schafer defines the ‘earwitness’ as a historical subject who ‘intimately’ experienced sounds from the past and who recorded ‘what he or she has heard.’ However, in the Holocaust, earwitnesses were more than documentary auditors, for hearing others’ wails affectively moved the earwitnesses, who often grew agitated because listening to these noises deepened their own pain.

THE ECHOING OF SOUNDS OF SUFFERING

From the moment that the locomotives approached the stations, the sounds terrorized. Hearing ‘the huffing of the steam engine’ that would transport her to Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1944, Sara Zyskind recalled that a ‘horrible fear took hold of me.’ But there was no time to take in the fear because as soon as the trains came to a halt, pandemonium erupted on the concourse when the guards asserted their dominance by yelling vicious words, beating the prisoners, and shooting. In response to this horrific ordeal, Jews panicked. They screamed and wailed as they quickly jumped into the cars to escape the physical and acoustic assaults.

Inside the carriages, the sounds of suffering continued. In fact, over the many days that Jews were locked in the cars, anguished noises crescendoed, due largely to the abject conditions. Among the most pronounced sounds were wails and cries that registered acute distress. Shipped to Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1944, David Kahan remembered ‘the people screaming and crying and, and, and it was just, that was the first horrible, horrible situation that, that uh, I recall vividly [….] the children crying, women crying, sick people asking for, begging for help, asking for water, nobody there to help us.’ Numerous survivors pointed out that at the start of the journeys, people were generally courteous to one another. However, as the days wore on, anxiety mounted, and verbal and physical struggles consequently erupted. En route to Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1944, Olga Lengyel described the tense environment:

[L]ittle by little, the atmosphere was poisoned. The children cried; the sick groaned; the older people lamented. [….] Soon the situation was intolerable. Men, women, and children were struggling hysterically for every square inch. As night fell we lost all concept of human behavior and the wrangling increased until the car was a bedlam.

Reflecting on his journey to Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1944, Marton Adler explained that frayed nerves were the source of the disputes: ‘I mean you were in a stupor, you were cramped against each other, everybody is on top of everybody and everybody is screaming, “you're on my foot, you're on this and this” […]’

RELUCTANT EARWITNESSING

As Lengyel and Adler testified, the cars were filled with a web of competing sounds that rang simultaneously, continuously, and disharmoniously. With no privacy in the crowded cars, the emotional outpourings were heard by all. There simply was no escape from the terrifying din. Everyone was thrust into the role of earwitness.

Deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1944, Martin Walter reflected on the aguish that he had felt at hearing the nonstop sounds of suffering for three days. ‘The cries were—and I stood near the, near the uh, doors. I breathed in the air from the outside because inside was just unbearable.’ Ruth Klüger, who was transferred to Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1944, explained that she had resented being compelled to listen to a woman’s sobs: ‘An old woman who sat next to my mother gradually fell apart: first she cried and whimpered […]’ Forced to hear the weeping, thirteen-year-old Klüger became unsettled: ‘I grew impatient and angry with her, because here she was adding her private disintegration to the great evil of our collective helplessness.’ Consumed by her own suffering, Klüger heard the elderly woman’s cries as acoustic disturbances. Such testimony underscores that many Jews resented having to serve as earwitnesses because being forced to hear others’ paroxysms compounded their own pain. 

Perturbed by others’ disconsolate utterances, these reluctant earwitnesses became distraught, and to ease their pain, some attacked those who wailed. Sent to Strasshof in 1944 when she was eight, Olga Barsony-Verrall recounted such an incident: ‘The noise was deafening with people crying, screaming, and shouting all kinds of craziness. Some women had to be slapped to quiet them down.’ Overcome by the thundering outpourings, the earwitnesses sought to take command of the soundscape by striking those who voiced their suffering. Elie Wiesel also documented an assault that had occurred on a train headed toward Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1944. Wiesel described the continual screaming of a distressed woman: ‘”Fire! I can see a fire! I can see a fire!”’ she yelled ‘with a piercing cry [that] split the silence.’ Some people tried to calm her, but her screams were relentless, inflicting sensorial harm upon the others. ‘Our terror was about to burst […] Our nerves were at a breaking point. Our flesh was creeping,’ Wiesel recalled. With shattered nerves, a group of men ‘tied her up and put a gag in her mouth.’ But she soon broke free and screamed even louder. Therefore, the men tied her up again, but this time, they also hit her ‘several times’ on the head. Tormented by their own misery, they could not bear hearing the woman’s screams, so they squashed the noises by physically assaulting her. Fellow prisoners assented to the violence. As Wiesel testified, the others yelled, ‘”Make her be quiet! She’s mad! Shut her up! She's not the only one here. She can keep her mouth shut…”’ Although the woman eventually quieted herself, her sounds of suffering lingered sensorially. Wiesel reflected: ‘The heat, the thirst, the pestilential stench, the suffocating lack of air—these were as nothing compared with these screams which tore us to shreds.’ Highlighting the affective potency of sound, Wiesel acknowledged that the distressing noises continued to torment him long afterwards. While he suffered from a host of other sensorial violations, for Wiesel, it was the woman’s screams that continued to inflict pain.

ENDURING SONIC MEMORIES

Like Wiesel, many survivors were left with aching acoustic memories. With tears rolling down her face, Miriam Rosenthal testified that the journey continued to haunt her for decades. ‘Even now when I’m on a train the memory of that trip comes back.’ Rosenthal connected her frightful memories to the train’s aural environment. ‘You went, and you went, and you didn’t know where you were going … And the people were yelling and crying and hungry, screaming, hitting each other.’ Explaining in broken English how the sounds bequeathed painful sonic memories, Eva Cigler disclosed that four decades later, she continued to hear the screams: ‘l still uh, could hear my—I mean in my mind how the train was going and how the screaming was going around …’   

For some survivors, the sonic scars lodged themselves permanently into their bodies, as they continued to feel the sounds viscerally. For Grete Salus, who had been sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1944, it was her husband’s mental collapse on a train that had bored itself into her body. She recalled that when his bag got lost in the overflowing waste in the car, he descended into sheer despair, screaming uncontrollably. Salus characterized her husband’s wails as an ‘alarm signal’ that had stabbed her body. ‘Suddenly, everything inside of me became ice cold. I froze and felt danger, the greatest danger.’ This ‘alarm signal’ engraved itself permanently in Salus’ body. ‘I know that I still feel it today,’ she wrote. Salus’ harrowing recollection of her bewailing husband left indelible sonic scars. Like many other earwitnesses, she continued to hear and to feel the unbearable sounds from her captivity inside the wagon for years.

Sara Ann Sewell, Virginia Wesleyan University, 13 June 2025

SCHOLARLY LITERATURE

Frevert Ute, ‘Was haben Gefühle in der Geschichte zu suchen?’ Geschichte und Gesellschaft 35, no. 2 (2009): 183–208, here 202.

Gigliotti, Simone, The Train Journey: Transit, Captivity, and Witnessing in the Holocaust, New York: Berghahn Books, 2009.

Goodman, Steve, Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear, Cambridge: MIT Press, 2010, xiv.

Jean, Yaron, Hearing Experiences in Germany, 1914-1945 Noises of Modernity, Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022, 192-94.

Schafer, R. Murray, The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World, Rochester, VT: Destiny Books, 1977, reprint 1994, 137, 272.

WRITTEN AND ORAL TESTIMONIES

Barsony-Verrall, Olga (b. 1936), Missing Pieces: My Life as a Child Survivor of the Holocaust, Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2007, 44-45.

Birenbaum (née Grynsztajn), Halina (b. 1929), Hope is the Last to Die: A Personal Documentation of Nazi Terror, trans. David Welsh, Oświęcim, Poland: Publishing House of the State Museum in Oświęcim, 1967, reprint 1994, 87-90.

‘David Kahan Interview,’ conducted on August 14, 1995, Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive, University of Michigan-Dearborn, http://holocaust.umd.umich.edu/kahan/, accessed October 26, 2020.

‘Eva Cigler Interview’ conducted by Sidney Bolkosky, March 17, 1982, Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive, http://holocaust.umd.umich.edu/interview.php?D=cigler§ion=26, accessed March 26, 2020.

Klüger, Ruth (1931-2020), Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered, New York: Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 1992, reprint 2001, 48.

Lengyel, Olga (1908-2001), Five Chimneys: The Story of Auschwitz, Chicago: Academy Chicago Publishers, 1946, reprint 2000, 17.

‘Marton Adler Interview,’ July 13, 1989, Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive, University of Michigan-Dearborn, http://holocaust.umd.umich.edu/adler/, accessed March 26, 2020.

‘Miriam Rosenthal,’ in Mothers, Sisters, Resisters: Oral Histories of Women who Survived the Holocaust, ed. Brana Gurewitsch, Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1998, 187-203, here 190.

Salus, Grete (1910-1996), Eine Frau erzählt, Bonn: Bundeszentrale für Heimatdienst, 1958, 10.

Wiesel, Elie (1928-2016), Night, New York: Bantam Books, 1956, reprint 1985, 23-24.

Zyskind (née Plager), Sara (1927-1995), Stolen Years, New York: New American Library, 1981, 139.