Black milk

"This composition is based on an ambisonic recording made inside the Sauna at Auschwitz. This was the ‘bathhouse’ where new arrivals from the trains arriving at the camp were stripped of all their belongings, valuables and clothes, registered and tattooed with a number, then showered, shaved, disinfected and re-clothed. The building had a “clean” and a “dirty” side, and machines were used to steam and delouse clothing. Existing prisoners were also sometimes sent to the Sauna in attempts to control pests and disease in the camp."As Andrzej Strzelecki describes in the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum book about the Auschwitz Sauna, the purpose of this place had little to do with caring for prisoners’ hygiene. Instead, it acted as an instrument in the Nazis’ system of mass destruction and theft of the property of groups targeted in pursuit of their racist ideology. The sauna was also a site of ritual humiliation, dehumanisation and control, stripping people of their dignity. Most new arrivals believed they were being sent to labour camps or resettled to start new lives. Those “selected” on the train ramp never made it to the Sauna, however. They were taken directly to the gas chambers."The history of this place and the suffering of the people who passed through it deeply shaped my response to the field recording. In the composition I aimed to evoke the disorientation, disbelief, fear and oppressive control that must have been felt there and the mechanistic, industrialised systems that enabled such extensive dehumanisation. Given the nature of the subject I focused on the texture, sounds and voices in the recording and added additional sounds and instruments. The title, Black Milk, comes from Holocaust survivor Paul Celan’s poem, Todesfuge (Death Fugue)."Auschwitz sauna soundscape reimagined by Laura Hills, from a recording by Anders Vinjar.