Arts and humanities
Élise Petit is a musicologist and lecturer in 20th and 21st century music history at the UFR ARSH / UGA. She is also the curator of the exhibition.
Music resounded daily in the concentration camps and death centers of the Nazi regime. Why was music so prevalent in places where the most fundamental freedoms were violated?
The main use of music, still little known, was initiated by the camp authorities in 1933: it was "forced" music, played on command by orchestras of prisoners. It was an integral tool in the process of bringing people into line and annihilating them. Its second use was spontaneous, by the prisoners themselves: tolerated by the block leaders or sometimes completely clandestine, this music was part of the strategies of psychological survival and spiritual resistance to the concentration camp system.
The exhibition presents for the first time to the public numerous testimonies, instruments, scores, and drawings made by female and male prisoners, as well as photographs taken by the SS. It also addresses a few specific cases, notably French internment camps that became transit camps and the Theresienstadt ghetto camp. Above all, it plays the music that resonated throughout the concentration camp system from Dachau to Buchenwald and, more surprisingly, in the death camps of Treblinka, Majdanek, Chełmno, and the Auschwitz complex.
