The Sound of Auschwitz

listening to the past inside the present

HERE THERE ARE BLUEBERRIES, a play by Moisés Kaufman and Amanda Gronich, will be at the Berkeley Repertory Theater starting April 5th - May 11th. It’s an experience not to be missed.

“I’ve been doing theater for 40 years now,” said [playwright] Moisés Kaufman. “I have never heard the kind of silence that I hear in the audience when they’re watching this play.”^[1]

Although it’s widely known that the Holocaust is the most fully-documented mass murder of all time, visual documentation from the extermination camp of Auschwitz is beyond minimal. Gassing and then burning the bodies of the millions of victims wasn’t enough; almost every photograph or reel of film footage was deliberately destroyed by the Nazis fleeing at the time of liberation in order to hide the evidence of their atrocities. Eye-witness testimony of survivors (not to mention meticulous “bookkeeping” by perpetrators) is somehow still inadequate when it comes to countering the deniers and doubters.

What can art do in the face of such a conundrum? The film Son of Saul was created as a direct result of the phenomenal discovery of “the scrolls of Auschwitz,” buried papers which contained handwritten notes from the Sonderkommando forced to labor in the gas chambers and ovens. Son of Saul can be understood as a visual reconstruction of Auschwitz based on those scrolls, by giving us the near-silent yet unbearably harrowing perspective of a member of the “special detail” as he handles the humans about to become corpses. We become a witness to his witnessing. We see what he sees. More recently, we have The Zone of Interest—first the book, by Martin Amis, followed last year by the Oscar-winning film of the same name. While most viewers of the film might fixate on the moral juxtaposition of the Auschwitz commandant’s lush garden separated from the camp by a mere brick wall, what I really want to talk about is not the look but the sound of Auschwitz.

“We made two films,” explains Tarn Willers, one of the two sound designers for The Zone of Interest who together won a 2024 Academy Award for sound design. “I worked on the film we see…which was basically a family story in a house, children in a garden… and Johnnie [Burn] then recorded film two, which was the film that you hear.” Speaking to the press immediately after their win, Burn describes how writer-director Jonathan Glazer expected him to take a year and a half to become “an expert in the sound of Auschwitz in 1943.” He relied on witness testimonies—the guards who were prosecuted, and the victims and survivors—in an attempt to reproduce something for which there is no archival footage of audio recordings. “That was the challenge,” Burn says. “And treating it respectfully was immensely important.”

Loosely adapted from the novel of the same title, by Martin Amis, The Zone of Interest focuses on the family of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss, especially his wife Hedwig, who maintained an exquisitely-appointed villa and sumptuous garden separated by a wall from the most notorious extermination centerpiece of the Holocaust—the very place that Höss had helped to create. During the film’s opening minutes, the screen remains black as the score plays an overture; in darkness, we are invited to pay close attention to sound. For the remainder of the film, while Glazer’s camera is almost entirely set on the “roses and dahlias” side of the wall—and keeps viewers’ eyes trained on the foreground—the director also insists that our ears tune in to the “background.” The subtle yet unmistakable nightmare soundscape occurring within reach of our listening yet pointedly removed from our gaze continually reminds us that it takes effort to select one set of sounds—and one reality—over another. In effect, we as audience become complicit in the willful disregard for mass murder, choosing to look away from horror and instead toward something much more pleasant and superficially normal.

Sound is ephemeral unless recorded, or so we have been led to believe. But sound also has a way of staying inside you—something you can understand if you have revered for a lifetime a certain piece of music or memorized a beloved’s whispered voice. I’ve learned that it’s also possible to be haunted forever by a sound only heard by association with someone else’s lived experience. This happened to me with my father in the year 1983 while we were visiting the preserved-yet-vacant site of the former concentration camp of Buchenwald, the place in which he had been incarcerated for a year from the age of fifteen to sixteen. Although nearly forty years had passed since his liberation, our shared listening happened when we both heard in the exact same instant a rising gust of wind that contained a sound unmistakable to both of us. My father’s words to me came in the form of a question: “Does it sound like people screaming?” Yes, I nodded. I had heard it too. I was twenty-three and he was fifty-three. I have never forgotten the moment or the sound.

In the play Here There Are Blueberries, scenes inside the death camp of Auschwitz remain hidden from our visual and auditory senses. Conceived, written, and directed by Moisés Kaufmann, and co-written by Amanda Gronich, Blueberries is based on real events surrounding a photo album discovered by an American lieutenant colonel at the end of World War II, featuring well-preserved and captioned images of SS personnel and camp administrators. Uniformed in SS regalia, the men are shown relaxed and smiling alongside the flirtatious young secretaries called “Helferinnen” in German, or female “helpers.” The play’s title comes from one captioned photo in which a dozen women and one man (the album’s owner) are perched on a wooden railing, happily enjoying bowls of summer fruit. Indeed, we are told by the grandson of Höss that his grandfather had described it as “the best time of his life.”

The play centers on the archivist at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, to whom the former soldier sent the album after keeping it for more than 60 years. Together with curators who quickly determined the authenticity of the album, she soon figures out more of its shocking origins. Formerly a low-level clerk, the album’s main character became a “star” rubbing shoulders with super powerful men like the notorious Dr. Mengele; he also gained access to an adoring cluster of German women, all devoted to Hitler and the Nazi regime. The archivist addresses the audience with her repeated questions concerning “what these young women knew” about the atrocities being committed beyond the frames of these photos. As the archivist explains to the audience, there are almost no images in existence that document the camp’s crematoria or gas chambers or mass murders; the Nazis made sure to destroy such visual evidence of their crimes. Although the play appears to focus on visuals, including a spotlit vintage Leica camera in front of the curtain prior to Act 1, sound is absolutely key here too.

In contrast to Glazer’s film, the sounds of the camp itself are entirely absent. Almost. At one stunning moment that occurs more than mid-way through the play, the back wall of the set suddenly becomes the door of a freight car, rolling open with such an authentic and chillingly resonant clattering that my entire body reacted when I saw the play off-Broadway last year. Surrounded by an audience who seemed to collectively gasp, I burst into tears. A new character at the center of the stage addresses the audience by explaining that she too has found some photographs, images taken on the day of her arrival at Auschwitz. These huge black and white scenes now appear for us, and the woman, who has just been liberated, tells us that she recognizes not only her own face among the crowd of panicked and disoriented Hungarians—she also finds her own family members there. Namely, the parents and siblings she was separated from and whom she never saw again after that day.

Sometimes I worry that in writing about it, I may have exaggerated or over-dramatized the moment with my father at Buchenwald in 1983, turning the moment into an artifact more imagined than real. But I also know that the sound wasn’t just what we heard with our ears. We heard it with our bodies—my father’s body holding the permanent memory of being a prisoner in that place, and my own body as his daughter carrying the genetic imprint of his. For years there was no name for such things; and too many times to count I was told I was being over-sensitive and yes, dramatic, for feeling as though I carried my parents’ traumatic experiences under my own skin and inside my own nervous system. But what I want to say now is that the sounds of history can be personal and collective, singular and universal, full of echoes both understandable and incomprehensible. With deliberation and mechanization and intelligence and evil genius and an absolutely perfect disregard for morality. Not silence and not a voice, not the shouting of SS, not guns firing or dogs barking, not even people screaming. Not wind. These are the sounds of mass murder taking place, about to take place, repeatedly taking place, past, present and future. Are you listening?

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^[1] ~Jerusalem Post: https://www.jpost.com/diaspora/article-801801