She was assigned to Block 6 in the family camp, a barracks that housed young women and the camp’s male orchestra, an ensemble of incarcerated violinists, clarinet players, accordion players and percussionists who played their instruments not just when the prisoners marched out for daily labor details, but also during prisoner floggings.
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Performances could be impromptu, ordered at the whims of the SS, the paramilitary guard of the Nazi Party. In a postwar interview, Elias discussed how drunken SS troops would often burst into the barracks late at night.
First, they’d tell the orchestra to play as they drank and sang. Then they would pull young girls from their bunks to rape them. Pressed against the back of her top-level bunk to avoid detection, Elias heard the terrified screams of her fellow prisoners. Music is often thought of as inherently good, a view exemplified in the playwright Wilhelm Congreve’s oft-cited aphorism “music hath charms to soothe a savage breast.”
It is also often seen as a form of art that ennobles those who play and listen to it. Its aesthetic qualities seem to transcend the mundane and horrific.
Yet it’s also been used to facilitate torture and punishment, a topic I think is worth exploring. When I was researching my book “Drunk on Genocide: Alcohol and Mass Murder in Nazi Germany,” I was struck by the ways in which music accompanied deaths in the camps, the ghettos and the killing fields.
Beautiful music accompanying murder and rape is a bizarre and disturbing juxtaposition. But its use by the perpetrators to torture their victims and to celebrate their acts reveals not only the darker side of its use but also offers insights into the festive mindset of the killers as they participated in genocide.