Making Home, Making Sense: Aural Experiences of Warsaw and East Galician Jews in Subterranean Shelters during the Holocaust

• Main Author: Nikita Hock
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Centre de recherches sur les arts et le langage 2020-03-01
• Series: Transposition
• Subjects: Jews in hiding; sound history; aural architecture; resilience; survival; imagination
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/transposition/4205

This essay examines the depictions and interpretation of auditory experiences in a sample of Jewish diaries that were written in underground bunkers, earthen dugouts and cellars beneath urban centres in and around Warsaw and in the rural region of East Galicia in World War II. Concepts from musicology and sound studies are applied to model the subterranean dugouts as instances of “aural architecture” set through with perforations channelling the flow of sound from the outside. This highlights and contextualizes important aspects of how Jews in East Galicia inhabited their shelters. In particular, it draws attention to various sound-related bodily techniques and to more complex practices, such as surveilling “the outside” and the adapted routines of homemaking that shaped daily life in these hiding places. The essay further posits an interrelationship between the acoustic conditions in the hideouts and the imaginative descriptions employed by the authors to describe their hideouts. Examining what the diarists could hear of the outside world, and how it sounded to them in their shelters, helps account for marked differences in how they made sense of their current life conditions. Depending on both the nature of the sounds that could be heard, and their penetration and spatial localization underground, the diarists interpret the confines of their hideouts by using metaphors variously underlining protection and social exclusion.