Swallows

"There are so many extraordinary moments in Claude Lanzmann’s nine hour documentary, Shoah but it’s the interviews with the railway workers and the train drivers that helped facilitate the horrors of the holocaust (some of them still working those same lines when the movie was made in the 70’s and 80’s) and those with the farmers and local people who bore witness to the trains that have the most impact. The sheer matter-of-factness of their recounting; the lack of compassion, the smiles and shoulder shrugging. The banality of genocide. 

"After I’d watched Shoah, I felt as though something inside of me had been broken. From childhood I had grown up with the idea of this as the worst of human crimes, the word holocaust, alone, meant to pause for breath. Now here was the shock of seeing people involved with and witness to it writing it off as just another thing that happened in the course of a day of work. It was a shock, though, that came accompanied by an uncomfortable realisation that of course that’s how it was: for evil to be committed on such a huge scale it couldn’t have been any other way.

"The ‘Final Solution’ was a railway operation run to a timetable. It was: mechanics, logistics, coke and steam. Wagoning, shunting, shovelling and coaling. Rubber stamps and forms in triplicate. Cold, logical, every day planning. 

"I used locomotive sounds and looped them.

"There’s a legend that there are no birds at Auschwitz but I imagined gazing up high and longing to escape. I have also read about how the inmates began to see the contrails of the American bombers late in the war. I can’t imagine what that must have meant to them. I can’t imagine how much hope they still held onto after everything that they had experienced. 

"I imagined a folk song, sang it and then reprised its melody like a memory of the singer gone.

"In his book The Truce, Primo Levi recounts that the very worst thing said to the inmates by the camp guards was that even if by a miracle some of them survived the camp it wouldn’t matter, because the perpetrators were going to destroy all of the evidence and hide it all from the world and nobody that the survivors tried to tell about it would ever believe any of it was true.

"It is the duty of every one of us as human beings to make sure that that prophecy is never allowed to come to pass."

Birkenau Gate, Auschwitz soundscape reimagined by Jon Griffin.