Social Text

Thick Whisper and Thin Victory

Concentration Camps Contribution to Modern Acoustics
Rudolf Mrzek

Shouldnt truth itself, as transitivity and incessant transition of a

continual coming and going, be listened to rather than seen? But isnt
it also in the way that it stops being itself and identifiable?
Jean-Luc Nancy

Boven Digoel was an isolation camp, built in the deepest of the jungles of
the Dutch East Indies. Indonesians who attempted to overthrow the colonial government in the fall of 1926 and the spring of 1927 were interned
in the camp. The internment, for the rebels and their families, was for an
undetermined period of time, and few were released before the camp was
evacuated in 1943 when Dutch rule appeared to be over and the Japanese
armies were approaching.
Terezn (Theresienstadt), a Czech town sixty kilometers from Prague,
was emptied of its original population in 1942 and made into a ghetto for
the Jews who did not manage to escape from Europe in time. Initially
designed as a camp for elderly and privileged Jews, the ghetto remained
moderate by Nazi standards. Nevertheless, most of the Jews were gradually transported from Terezn to Auschwitz and the other camps of death.
The two camps could not differ more one from the other. Boven
Digoel was in the East, in the wilderness; the other was built in the heart
of Europe. Political radicals were kept in Boven Digoel; Jews were locked
in Terezn because of their grandmother. Terezn belonged to the Holocaust; Boven Digoel belonged to colonialism.
1. Camps as Cans

Red brick eighteenth- century walls with bastions surrounded the Jews in
Terezn. The town was built as a Habsburg fortress against Prussia.
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Josef II, the father of the homeland . . . on October 10, 1780, laid the cornerstone of this eternal edifice, according to a Latin inscription on one of
the fortress walls.1

Inside the walls,

all the Barracks of Terezn were built with the same design. The quadrangular courtyards with archways and wide encircling loggias are pleasantly reminiscent of the architecture of Southern monasteries. There is also a practical
reason for this plan an alarm signal sounded from the center of the courtyard must be equally audible in all surrounding dwellings.2

No walls surrounded Boven Digoel no bastions, and not even a

wire. There was a forest instead, huge with no roads. There was permanent twilight in a forest filled with marshes, mosquitoes, snakes, rivers
with crocodiles, and the people of the forest, the most primitive men on
the surface of the earth, as the Dutch authorities in the camp liked to
point out, head- cutters and cannibals.
But neither of the two camps was an oubliette. Neither the walls
nor the forest completely deadened the noise and voices from the outside.
It was not about these two camps that these words were written in the
Book of Job: Down there bad men bustle no more, / there the very rest. /
Prisoners, all left in peace, / hear no more the shouts there of the gaoler.3
The Jews in Terezn heard the bells from a nearby village church. A
motorway from Prague to Berlin cut through the ghetto. It was separated
from the barracks and houses where the Jews lived by a six-foot wooden
fence on both sides. But the people in the ghetto heard cars, trucks, buses,
and bicycles, even pedestrians as they passed through. They could only
hear them. Sometimes, Aryan relatives came to the wooden fence that
separated the ghetto from the main road, once the time and place of meeting had been determined through a go-between, in order to exchange a
few words with relatives, even if they could not see their faces.4 Planes
of both the Nazis and the Allies flew over the ghetto on their missions to
Prague, Dresden, or Berlin. And when the siren woke us at night, first we
were scared. . . . The fast fighters cut the skies with their lightning speed;
one could hardly follow them with eyes.5
In Boven Digoel, with no nearby village or town that modern people
of the camp would call village or town, the internees listened for sounds
around the camp with no less eagerness than the Jews in Terezn. The
survivors of Boven Digoel vividly recall hearing the forest: We felt ourselves in the middle of the primeval forest nobodies and helpless. . . . It
was all indescribable! A forest without monkeys, elephants and tigers, but
with wild swine, cassowaries, birds and especially reptiles. All completely

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other than the fauna of Sumatra!6 All but very few internees came from
either Java or Sumatra, the big islands in the west of the huge Indies
archipelago. Boven Digoel was on the very eastern edge of it. The famous
Wallace divide between Asia and Melanesia lay between the camp and
home. Monkeys did not screech around Boven Digoel, and the birds, some
internees recalled, could not sing.7
Planes flew over Boven Digoel, too. As the war in the Pacific broke
out, Japanese planes appeared over the camp. As in Terezn, the planes
were eagerly awaited listened for. As soon as the roar of the motors could
be heard, the guards pushed the internees inside. Many internees disregarded the orders. They waved to the planes with whatever they could
put their hands on at the moment the Japanese were the enemies of
the Dutch and so the friends of many in the camp. Like in Terezn, in
Boven Digoel the planes roared like freedom. 8 The internees in either
camp might cry out with Wagners Tristan: What, am I hearing light?9
Every six weeks a Dutch government steamer came up the Digul
River to the camp with a load of guards, internees, supplies, and letters.
Like the sound of planes, the ships whistle was eagerly listened for and
could be heard days before the ship became visible at the turn of the river
bend.
sss
The camps face me like a painting on canvas now, like the Warhol painting of the Campbells soup cans. Warhol must just provoke me. The cans
cannot be as depthless as he makes them look. Are they full? If so, how
does their fullness sound? Is this what a scholar should be provoked to to
put an ear to the cans, to put an ear to the camps?
can, noun: 1. A cylindrical metal container; 2. Informal, prison; 3. Informal,
the toilet. Verb: . . . 1. Preserve (food) in a can; 2. Informal, dismiss (someone) from their job . . . reject (something) as inadequate. . . . Phrases: a can
of worms, a complicated matter likely to prove awkward or embarrassing.10

When I was about seven, I helped my mother make preserves. I

pushed the lids down. Each can was a vessel to keep inside what naturally
was of the outside. If fresh air got in, the preserves would be spoiled.
When I put my ear to the can, and when I could hear a bubbling sound
from the inside, it was a sign of disaster. The can might even explode. Of
course, this is a metaphor.
At Belzec . . . a German visitor, Professor Pfannenstiel, wanted to know what
was going on inside [of a gas chamber]. He is said to have put his ear to the
wall and, listening, to have remarked: Just like in a synagogue.11

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The camps were like cans, and like vessels, but not of the Heideggerian
sense, the manifold of the world: of clay formed into a shape by human
hand, dried in the sun to hold water or wine, blessed by gods, the source
of life. The essence of the camps as cans was fully in their function to shut
and to open, to compress to concentrate.
2. Calling from the Outside

The walls around Terezn and the forest around Boven Digoel did not
deaden the sound from the outside. They reverberated with it. The sound
from the outside reached the camps, but its fullness was produced by the
enclosures. What the camps heard of the world beyond the camps was
the enclosure sounding.
History mentions tapes or relays as the inevitable fixtures of the
Russian czarist penal colonies.12 Through the relays, tapes, or halting
stations, the exiles as well as the guards journeyed from Europe to the
camps. The relays on the way made them, one relay at a time, into the camp
people.13 A relay is
1. A group of people or animals engaged in a task or activity for a fixed
period of time and then replaced by a similar group . . . ; 2. An electrical
device, typically incorporating an electromagnet, that is activated by a current or signal in one circuit to open or close another circuit; 3. A device
to receive, reinforce, and retransmit a broadcast or program; a message or
program transmitted by such a device. . . . Origin: . . . based on Latin laxare
slacken.

There could never be certainty in the camps about the truthfulness

of the sounds heard from the outside. The walls, the forest, the enclosures
around the camps, and the distance the tape, the relays let through
or stopped, muffled or amplified the sounds. This incertitude about the
sounds, in fact, is what the camp people describe when they say what they
heard.
There were Czech gendarmes on guard duty in Terezn (the SS
guards were stationed in special quarters). On a rare and happy occasion an internee could overhear the Czech gendarmes talking about their
home, their world after work and beyond the walls. As the government
steamer was being reloaded in Boven Digoel, sailors had to wait for a
few days in the camp. They might get relaxed or bored or drunk and say
something to or within earshot of an internee. These bits of message that
got through, of course, had also passed through halting stations. Still, it
was the best of the truth that the people of the camps got slivers of truth,
or so it was believed.
The internees in New Guinea called the best of the truth Boven4

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Digoel folklore. The Jews in Terezn called the same things true tram
conductors stories14 the message echoed through the camp like a tram
car through a city: it might take some people in, it might let some people
out; it passed. Another Terezn (and camp and Yiddish) term for this best
of truth was Bonkes: Bonke (plural: Bonken or Bonkes) is called everything untrue, namely rumors favorable to Jews. In Terezn one of the most
often used expressions.15
The Bonkes reaching the camps, and it is the point, were complete,
full in body, rich in details, and finely nuanced, total:
Friday January 16, 1942 The bus [to Prague] did not arrive. Instantaneously
there were rumors that the borders [of Germany] are closed for a revolution
is coming, etc.16
Friday September 22, 1944. . . . Yesterdays news about a transport completely
dies out. It was a rumor apparently.17

All the news that reached the camps because of the very eagerness of the
camp people to hear was breaking news. It made no sense to be skeptical about it lest there will be no news, like no stars and no skies: Look
at the universe, the shining stars, millions and millions of them, theyre
phonies dead for billions of years! evaporated.18
In 1933, big breaking news reached the Boven Digoel camp. There
was a mutiny on the Dutch warship De Zeven Provincin, and Indonesian sailors were also involved. In fact, the cruiser was bombed and the
mutiny suppressed by the time the news reached the camp. But the people
in Boven Digoel listened to the enclosure. For days and weeks, in fact
months, after it was in fact all over phonies, dead, evaporated the
people in Boven Digoel listened for a whistle of the cruiser that would
come up the Digul and take them to freedom.19 (It does not belong to the
story, really, but a couple of months later, one of the Indonesian sailors
who took part in the mutiny was arrested and brought to the camp as a
punishment. There is no record that the other internees were interested
in his version of the events.) 20
sss
Calls, or representations, sendings (envois), Jacques Derrida wrote,
never reach their final destination or reunite with the object or idea they
represent. The sendings have inevitable destinerrance. They are
in a state of interminable wandering and, he added, (like that of the
Jews).21 Derrida commented on communication in the modern world,
and not explicitly in the camps. But the camps were modern. They were
concentrated modern.
The enclosures did not deaden the calls from the outside. The calls,
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like the din of the planes overflying the camps, could for a minute or two
drown out everything else in the camps. But the calls passed quickly, like
the planes, first the silhouette if it happened during the daytime and the
sky was clear, and then the sound. They were a sound mirage: In parting,
the Now that was stays with us, but differently, above all when it has not
been lived out to its end; that is, it haunts us . . . [as] halfness . . . tremolo
between illusion and depth.22 It haunted the listeners in the camps,
to use Ernst Blochs words, this halfness, this tremolo between illusion and depth.23 Neither Derrida nor Bloch wrote particularly about the
camps. Sense . . . reaches me only by leaving in the same movement,
wrote Jean-Luc Nancy in Listening.24 Such is the fugue of the call, and the
more so when one happened to be locked in the camps.
fugue: Music, a contrapuntal composition in which a short melody or phrase
(the subject) is introduced by one part and successively taken up by others
and developed by interweaving the parts. Origin: late 16th century: from
French, or from Italian fuga, from Latin fuga flight, related to fugere flee.
fugacious adjective poetic/literary tending to disappear; fleeting.

The calls reaching the camps and the calls sent from the camps to the
outside were totally made of destinerrance. The departing of the sound was
how hope in the camps sounded like hope, no other sound but this. This
was what the camps, in their truth and while still in hope, sounded like.
This is also the only way possible that we can hear the camps departing.
Our sense of the camps sounds merely, if in tune, with this parting.25
3. Membrane: The Vibes
membrane: a pliable sheet-like structure acting as a boundary, lining, or partition in an organism, . . . a thin pliable sheet or skin of various kinds . . . a
microscopic double layer of lipids and proteins that bounds cells and organelles and forms structures within cells. Origin: from Latin membrana, from
membrum limb.

Few people in Boven Digoel ever attempted to escape through the forest;
there was no other way. Without any exception known to me, they all got
lost and perished, were caught, or, exhausted, turned around and asked
to be taken back to the camp.
To run from Digoel could be translated as to kill oneself.26
Military patrol . . . came upon several items left behind in an empty Papua
village: a diary belonging to (an escapee) Dachlan, a small trunk with clothing and, most importantly, two charred skeletons that did not resemble those
of Papuans. . . .
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Sedajak from Banten died on the run. . . .

Soehodo from Jakarta died on the run. . . .
Abas from Mandailing died on the run.27
A survivor recalled how he heard military and civilian authorities in the
settlement laughing about runaway desperados . . . on a roasting spit. 28

Even fewer prisoners ever attempted to escape from the Terezn ghetto.
If a person somehow got through the walls, there was the Protectorate of
Bohemia and Moravia, no roasting spit, but the Czechs (my aunts and
uncles) fearful and as little inclined to help a Jew as were the Papuan
people.29 The bells of the Czech church and the sounds of people behind
the wall were the calls the ghetto listened for as the sounds of freedom
sounded the true camp calls only in tune with their parting.
On January 9, 1943, eighteen young men attempted to escape from the
ghetto and were caught not far away. They were all sentenced to public
hanging. With the rope already around his neck, one sang Voskovec and
Werichs famous song When We Will March by the Millions, All against
the Wind. 30

The song was a marching song, optimistic: everybody in Bohemia, Jew

or not, knew the song. They all watched the man die, and the man sang
the song. In parting, the song and the voice belonged fully to the man
singing and perhaps to those who listened fully, for the moment. It
was the moment, of course, when both the man and the voice died in the
rope died away, departed.
sss
Anybody who touches even the surface of what happened in Boven Digoel
and Terezn cannot be but struck and, more, dumbfounded by the music
in the camps.
Javanese classical gamelans, popular Hawaiian tunes, or urbanstreet krontjong were played, listened to, composed, and rehearsed in
Boven Digoel day and night:
Saturday, June 29, 1935 . . . Night: 7:52 . . . There is a group of people playing krontjong in the house of Karsowikromo. . . . 9:47 . . . The house of Ag.
Soeleman is dark. Police walks to the section C. In the house of Soerjosoeprodjo and Pontjopengrawit, the rehearsal of gamelan does not take place
because few people came. Many people can be seen playing krontjong in the
house of Karsowikromo. 10:00 Police breaks up this krontjong group. . . .
10:10 The breaking up of this group does not go without problems. . . .
Among the internees who decline to stop are Prawirokarsiman who plays
kembang, Wirjosoedarmo (guitar), and Moh. Ali no. 820 (who listens).31

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Saturday, July 22, 1936 . . . Night: . . . 8:05 . . . Police hear Pontjopangrawito in his house playing gender [instrument]. The house of Tjitrowijono is
quiet.32

The internees built a complete gamelan orchestra in the camp.

Its bonang (gong-rows) were made of milk tins.. . . Pontjopangrawito first
used iron tins of powdered milk . . . as substitute for the gongs in his bonangs.
He made a rebab (two- string bowed lute) from sardine tins and animal skin,
as he could not obtain the buffalo intestine or bladder parchment needed
for the rebab belly, nor were (half) coconut shells available for the purpose. For the most respected instrument of all the gong gedh kemodhong
Pontjopangrawito and colleagues made a large earthenware water pitcher
(normally used in the kitchen) as a resonator which was placed inside a
wooden box with two knobbed iron keys cold- hammered into slightly different pitch-levels and strung on top with cord.33

The forest or not, the cannibals or not, the Dutch or not, Boven
Digoel was a concentrated-modernity camp. Naturally, there was jazz.
Every occasion was good for our unsurpassed Andoel Xarim . . . to conduct
his jazz band in its cacophonic performance. We gladly forgave him.34
Because of the awful sounds that the ensemble produced, we quickly
changed its name from Digoel- Concert to Digoel- con- sneert.35

(Sneert is in Dutch a kind of soup made of everything.) None of the

camp jazz lovers survived to tell me. But I wish to believe that at least two
Jews, like Benny Goodman or Artie Shaw, might be on the Digoel Concert
repertoire.
The internees of Boven Digoel built a special House of Culture
and Entertainment a big edifice and in the very middle of the camp,
with no walls, a palm-leaf roof, and twelve bamboo poles. Tickets were
sold for chairs, benches, and standing room only. Events were packed, the
whole camp was present, and as the years passed, the people of the forest
also appeared. Attracted by music, the nudists, as the internees called
them, with a dog or a cassowary bone in the nose, plumages of a paradise
bird or a cockatoo in the hair, listened and sometimes rocked to the music
in their own way.
According to the documentation from Terezn that survived, more
than one thousand concerts were given in the ghetto during the less than
four years of the camps existence. Chamber music, symphonies, recitals,
operas, Jewish music, light Viennese, and jazz were played, composed,
and listened to. People made music in barracks, attics, and courtyards, as
well as in the towns former gymnasium and movie theater. A special place
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for music had been built in the ghetto, too, the music pavilion; and, as in
Boven Digoel, it was also in the middle of the camp. 36 Otto Brod, a friend
of Franz Kafka and brother of Kafkas well-known biographer, was present at the camp performance of Verdis Requiem (he perished less than a
year later in Auschwitz with his wife and a daughter, who also sang in the
Requiem), and he wrote a review for a ghetto newssheet: Impressively
skillful conducting by Schlchter: in the course of a year, the piece was
imprinted in the heads of singers so deeply that they sang without scores.
Rhythmic and dynamic clarity. Melodic diversity, energy and explicit
articulation of voices. . . . Probably, the Dies Irae could have been given a
greater presto. The piano was out of tune; yet the accompaniment of Frau
Pollak was outstanding.37
Habit can explain much of the overwhelming presence of music in
both of the camps. A disproportionate number of the Boven Digoel internees were people with modern (Dutch colonial) education. They were more
open than average to all things modern open enough to attempt a revolution! Music, and the kind of music that was later played in the camp,
urban and urbane, belonged to their lives long before they were interned.
Virtually all Jews in Terezn came from the big cities and metropolises of Central and Western Europe. Music of Prague, Vienna, Berlin,
or Amsterdam still must have been ringing in their ears, ghetto or no
ghetto, walls or no walls no week without a concert was a must.
Habit, however, can explain the music in Boven Digoel and Terezn
only in part. The music certainly sounded like an echo of what was played
before the camps and was still being played outside the camps. Yet, in
the camps, it was camp music. Edmund Husserl is wrong in saying that
there is no physical time in music. There was a camp physical time in
the camp music. Music in the camps came nearest to what Husserl himself
calls the living present.38 However high the intensity of the music might
have been outside and before the camps, the intensity of the camp music
was concentrated. It was the intensity of the enclosure. There they sat,
lost and fragile, nodding their heads to the sound of Tales from the Vienna
Woods or tunes from Carmen.39 The camp music was a camp kind of
music also because it lived at its fullest in departing.
Julia Sallinger, a singer in the Prussian Royal Opera, who was born
in 1873 . . . survived in Terezn practicing her singing, trilling with her
voice that was grating in her old age, wearing a veil on her face and a
feather boa around her neck.40 I only wish to believe that the feather boa
that Miss Sallinger was wearing, in the fashion of her time, was made of a
plumage of a bird of paradise from around Boven Digoel. My thesis would
deserve it that the two camps were one, or at least of one constellation,
by the way their music was played and their songs sung.

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4. Authenticity

The calls sent out from the camps if they reached so far were usually
stopped by the enclosure, turned back, and, as an echo of the walls, the
forest, and the distance, in all their vagueness and indirectness, fell back
on the ears of the camp people. The heaviness with which the sound
fell back was what Martin Heidegger called groundedness of sense 41
groundedness of hearing in this case.
The heaviness of the call containing the sound of the enclosure
made it next to impossible to distinguish the calls components and to
ascertain where it was really coming from. When one really listened in the
camp, one could not achieve much more than to become part of the heaviness. In the camps vastly more than elsewhere, the enclosure that worked
as a membrane was not merely a technological device a device of the
future at least. The membrane had become organic. It grew into the camp
peoples bodies. It became an organ that gave the camp people capacity
to hear, if the people were to hear at all, and if they wished to know if they
were being heard at all.
Everything that was heard in the camps and all the sounds the
camps were sending out mixed, amplified, adjusted were the sounds of
the camp people themselves, their fears and eagerness. In this, there was
no mishearing. It was the real call. Perhaps never in history had human
bodies come so closely to resemble Platos cave, and Platos cave so closely
to resemble a camp: In Platos cave, there is more than just the shadows of the objects being moved about outside: there is also the echo of
the voices of those who move them, a detail we usually forget, since it is
so quickly set aside by Plato himself in favor of the visual and luminous
scheme exclusively.42
There was no way to resist, any way except to naturally become a
part: Its hard to despise your own substance, youd like to stop all this,
give yourself time to think about it, and listen without difficulty to your
heartbeat, but its too late for that. This thing can never stop. . . . You give
in to noise as you give in to war.43
sss
Greedily the camp people tried to hear the world in the camp groundedness of hearing. They were like a person groping for a stone falling into
water, to catch it before it sinks, before the circles on the water grow wide,
fade, and disappear. To catch a call in the echo was impossible. The more
so, then, did the camp people try to compress and to concentrate the echo
as it was.
This was also the reason that music was so important in the camps.
The importance given to music in the camps was a way to catch the stone,
to compress, structure, and concentrate the echo. One learns to keep com10

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posure while looking at the lists of the people who perished in the camps.
But it sometimes went beyond bearing in the Terezn and Boven Digoel
archive, leafing through the files with sheets of music, requests for permission to play, and concert tickets sold in the camps.
The camp people very often named monotony as the terror of the
camps. One survivor of Boven Digoel listed the three most brutal aspects
of the camp loneliness, nostalgia, and monotony. 44 In the sixth year of
his imprisonment, an article about him and a few photographs appeared
in an Indonesian newspaper. Police reported on the article: Several photographs of Digoel internees are published in the paper. Under a portrait
of [one of them] A. Ch. L. Salim . . . there is a caption: . . . Days follow
days and days are followed by nights. Months and years follow one after
the other. 45
Against monotony, and one might believe it especially when in camp,
music offered phrasing, structure, concentration, stricture of art grasping
the echo. Even repetition, when music came in, might suggest a surprise,
a stumbling, or a change as Gertrude Stein put it, hoppfully, like a frog
hopping he cannot ever hop exactly the same distance or the same way of
hopping at every hop.46 The jazzmen in the camps might have said, and
believed, that in syncopation music might cut through the Platonic echo
of the enclosure, in a rhythm of liberation or, at least, of crashing.
This, however, was not what happened. Whenever the monotony
of a camp was disrupted, whenever the camp frogs happened not to hop
exactly the same way, it proceeded in the phrasing of the camp. The tempi
of the camps were changing, but in the camp way. The everyday of the
camps was rhythmical, but in the ways of the camps in a serial-movie
monotonous way. Rhythm is an equation, Le Corbusier wrote, and he
applauded it as something very modern and avant- garde. 47 In that sense,
and this is just more proof of it, the camps were modern and avant- garde.
With the rhythmic and syncopated order of the camps that they themselves helped to play, the camp people performed to use Michel Foucaults definition this time discipline monotony.48
In the Boven Digoel police report book (agents made rounds in the
camp four times a day), when the internees in Boven Digoel turned to
music, it was not noted as a moment of crashing but as repetitie a Dutch
word for rehearsal. By a certain hour in the evening, according to the camp
rules, the music, repetitie, was ordered to stop so that the camp might go
to sleep. In Boven Digoel the music was the camp clock. In Terezn, the
music was made one of the camp aesthetics. Dr. Hugo Friedman organized
architectural tours for his fellow prisoners through the ghetto. As they
walked the ghetto streets and along the ghetto walls, he always stopped at
certain places and explained what he meant by the rhythmic movement
of line of Terezn construction.49 The ghetto was music.
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The people of the camps, of course, thought about freedom. They

possibly thought about nothing else. They tried to resist the camp acoustics vibrating around them and through them. They strove to stay what
they would have been if not for the camps. Their thinking about freedom,
of course, was related to their struggle to be authentic:
authentic: . . . 1. Of undisputed origin; genuine . . . made or done in the traditional or original way, or in a way that faithfully resembles an original . . . ;
2. Relating to or denoting an emotionally appropriate, significant, purposive,
and responsible mode of human life.

There are, in my MacBook dictionary, two distinct definitions of

authentic. And it can immediately be seen that the authenticity in the
second definition relating to or denoting . . . purposive, and responsible
mode of human life was something very difficult to achieve or even
attempt in the camps.
The proximity into which the camp people were forced condensed,
with the lid pushed down hard to close was barely a proximity that
Emmanuel Levinas wrote about in connection with the responsible mode
of human life: I have tried to define [proximity] otherwise than by a
reduced space separating the terms that one calls close. I have tried to pass
from spatial proximity to the idea of the responsibility for another . . . an
incessant dis- quitude of not being open, paradoxical and contradictory
responsibility for a foreign freedom.50
No one in the camp could be advised to make oneself open, disquiet,
and thus responsible in Levinass sense. Levinas indeed also wrote: Only
a vulnerable I can love his neighbor.51 The camp authenticity could not
sustain such responsibility. The camp authenticity was almost completely
defined by the first part of my dictionary entry the authentic in the
camps meant predominantly, and almost exclusively, to be or to appear to
be of undisputed origin; genuine . . . in the traditional or original way, or
in a way that faithfully resembles an original.
After more than a month of journey to the east, in the hold of the
ship or alternatively unsheltered on the deck, after being for weeks in
chains, five together, the first group of the Indonesian internees arrived
at Boven Digoels landing place. Thus they were, or appeared to be, to a
journalist who was the only outsider permitted to travel with them: More
than half is in European clothes . . . elegant city wear and soft felt hats,
straw hats or little black velvet caps and European walking shoes . . .
neat leather briefcases, some with umbrella and a bundle of books, others with a guitar.52 An internee described the same scene on one of the
ships that followed, on which he traveled. To the things mentioned by the
journalist as what the internees wore and carried, he added socks (not

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a usual thing in the tropics), a couple of typewriters, and mandolins

and violins.53
These men, women, and children brought to the camp stayed correctly dressed, as they would be if not at (because of) the camp, despite
the heat and dirt on the ship, despite the hopelessness of it all. They were
caught in this description at the moment of coming forth into being as
camp people. They resisted the camp, and they were becoming of the
camp at the very same moment and by the very same effort. With courage and in desperation they were stating their authenticity by performing their undisputed origin, being genuine, faithfully resembling an
original.
The internees of Boven Digoel struggled to stay what they would
have been if not for the camp people with modern consciousness (rebels in this case). They dressed, moved, spoke, and listened authentically.
They made music authentically (with guitars, mandolins, and violins).
Never did the camp sound so much as a camp as when the newcomers
unpacked and began to play. The most famous internee of Boven Digoel,
Soetan Sjahrir (in 1945 he became the first prime minister of independent
Indonesia), was or appeared to be the most authentic: I often heard him
sing, especially one of the European hits. I will always remember his:
Das gibt nur einmal, das kommt nie wieder, das ist zo schn um wahr zu
sein! 54
In Terezn also the people made music with vengeance, what Bloch
might call the turmoil of musical compulsion.55 As in Boven Digoel,
there was a severe respect in Terezn for the classical. In their struggle to
be authentic, they played jazz jazzier and Verdi more Verdianly than any
jazz or Verdi anywhere, outside the camps or before the camp, was ever
played.
5. Long-Distance Whisper

The journalist who was allowed to go on the first ship with the Indonesian internees also described the last three days of the journey, upstream
on the Digul. The river narrowed; the forest became ever more compact
on both sides and ever closer to the ship. Only a few times during the
three days, a figure or a group of the people of the forest appeared. More
often than that, nothing was visible and merely screams were heard as the
ship passed. That is to say, it has sounded like screams, because nobody
on the ship understood the language. The communists on the foredeck
screamed back in the same manner.56
An internee was traveling on one of the next ships. He described
his experience also as an almost purely acoustic moment and in a way
almost identical to that of the journalist: I will never forget the ship
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journey. . . . We were stuck in the immense silence. . . . The first reaction

was remarkably enough that we began to speak softer. We stopped
with our singing! 57
As the people of the forest screamed, the internees screamed back.
As the forest and the world got silent, the internees stopped singing. By
listening and making sound or getting silent shrieking, holding breath
the internees became one with the nature they inhabited. They became
part of the world. They became social in a camp way by becoming
their surroundings sounding board and what in all things makes the
sounding-board is this theres naught beneath.58
Noise and voices, perhaps calls and perhaps languages, but not
really understood, remained around the internees throughout the years of
captivity the shrieks of unfamiliar people, cries of unfamiliar animals,
sounds of unfamiliar trees swaying, of the river, of the rains that one could
hear in Boven Digoel long before the drops fell. The urge to make music
was also an attempt to bear these sounds. There was no way to escape
them, but music could make perhaps some sense of them:
As the hours of day change so do the sounds. . . . With the first rays of the
sun on the eastern skies, you hear the first bird, . . . a kingfisher . . . then
comes a shout of a parrot . . . a white cockatoo . . . a water bird . . . a bird
of paradise. . . . Then a pause, and the cicadas break in, sharp on a second.
First, a thin and sharp tone by a single cicada gives a sign that is sent over
the water. A multiple-voice chord falls in just for a moment and, then, as
response from the distance, the trilling and swishing song of the cicadas
second choir begins.59

This was pathetic, of course, but desperation and courage of the camp
people were reflected in nothing as much as this. Equally pathetic and
equally epic were the quartets, the symphonies, the operas, and the jazz
in Terezn, or the listening to the bells of the Christian church behind the
ghetto walls and believing one was hearing a life- saving authenticitysaving music in them. As Kafka wrote about another Jewish place:
Whoever can cry should come here on Sunday.60
The camp turmoil of musical compulsion grew from the effort to
organize the noise. In that sense, the most charged and the most pathetic
moment of the struggle, and the most sublime form of the camp music,
were roll calls. More than anything, roll calls made the Terezn ghetto, as
well as the Boven Digoel camp, what they had been and how they sounded.
The roll calls were the calls of the camps. It was a Jericho moment: The
day when there shall be a blast on the trumpet, and ye shall come in
crowds.61 The trumpets sounded and they came in crowds, but the walls
remained standing. They only got stronger by the blast.
The sound of the roll call pressed down upon, condensed humans
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into the camp better than anything else, including the walls, forest, or
watchtowers. By the sound of the roll call, the camp people were summoned to being in naming, that is, in calling.62
The roll call to take quinine pills . . . Uncle Patty called out the names in the
alphabet order, from A to Z. / At last we hear Sardjono called then the
name of Soetaslekan and after this Soemiradjo, the name of my father. /
Quickly our whole family stepped forward to receive the quinine pills, the
adults three pieces of pills and children two pieces, made in Bandung (pill
BK Bandoengse Kinine Fabrik). We had to swallow the pills watched by
Uncle Patty we could not just take them and go. 63

The medical call (a method, in fact, to check whether any internee

has escaped) was probably the most vividly remembered event in Boven
Digoel. The most vividly remembered event in Terezn (more often
recalled than the public execution of 1943) was the big roll call of
November 1944. An error was found in the ghetto records, and the SS
commander ordered recounting. All the inhabitants, including children,
the sick, and the old, were forced to stand in a closed formation for eighteen hours. People were fainting; children were crying. Some young men
attempted to encourage the others as a protest or even a resistance to
sing. According to some eyewitnesses (ear witnesses), the young people
even began to sing according to different memories Internationale,
Hatikva, or some folk songs, Czech or Jewish. 64 They had barely even
begun, however, when they were hushed down. The people listened for the
call as the camp people. As the camp people, they were poised:
poise: noun: 1. Graceful and elegant bearing in a person . . . , composure
and dignity of manner . . . ; 2. Archaic, balance, equilibrium. be poised (of a
person or organization): be ready to do something.

Louis Althusser argued that in modern society it was policemen and

clergymen who gave the voice to the absolute. 65 The camps, however, it
seems, rose to a higher stage than that. There were still policemen and
clergymen (sort of) in the camps. But now it was the voicing and listening by themselves that did the job, a super-high organized voicing and
listening that is coding:
code: a system of words, letters, figures, or other symbols substituted for
other words, letters, etc. . . . a system of signals, such as sounds, light flashes,
or flags, used to send messages.

In the camps sooner than out of the camps and with much greater
assertiveness coding gave voice to the absolute. The internees listened
with a particular acuteness to a code. Their voices, also, sounded more
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meaningful and profound when in code. The ghetto police Captain

Meisl, some children of the ghetto wrote into their stenciled paper distributed in Terezn, told us quite in confidence that five short blows
on a whistle meant that a ghetto policeman was calling for help.66 The
SS guards restricted themselves . . . to spoken word, and to the spoken
word everybody had to listen.67 The people were on the streets when
an announcement came that the first Dutch transport was coming into
the ghetto, and that everybody had to be locked inside. . . . An SS officer
screamed he would begin shooting if there was not an absolute silence
immediately.68
Even the softest and kindest of voices and calls were heard best in
the camps absolutely when in codes. A few minutes before the curfew, the people were outside and the streets buzzed with talking. Then
came Good night. 69 Everybody trying to assert some authenticity had
to speak in and listen to the codes, or at least close to code, concisely:
concisely: Origin: Latin concisus, past participle of concidere cut up, cut
down, from con- completely + caedere to cut.

Joseph Roth, a Jew who escaped the camps only because he decided
to run away soon enough and fast enough (and because he drank himself
to death, in Paris, before the Nazis could get him), had already written in
1936 to his friend, a fellow writer and fellow Jew: Havent you got that
yet? The word has died, men bark like dogs.70
Roth, however, was not exactly right this time. The voicing- ascoding in the camps, as outside of the camps at the time, was not exactly
barking. It only sounded animalish, meaning not developed enough on
the scale of voicing evolution. Coding was human, and it was not a baby
talk either a kind of deflation, which transforms the so- called wild
sound, of the babbling period into entities of linguistic value.71 The coding was not aphasia either, a degenerated way of speaking typical of senile
people.72 The least of all the coding was a sign of madness as Paul Celan
wrote about Friedrich Hlderlin: If he spoke of this time, he could only
babble and babble.73
The coding that gave the voice to the absolute was an engineered,
highly developed form of language, efficient, easy, tweeting before tweeting had been invented. (My MacBook dictionary still defines tweet merely
as the chirp of a small or young bird; make a chirping noise. But it is
already less happy- go-lucky: Origin: mid 19th century: imitative.)
The ultimate code is a digit, a finger pointed or a number a number (code) of age, ethnicity, political orientation, race, manners, color of
eyes the camps, as with so many other things, were ahead of their time
and exemplary. In Boven Digoel, numbers preceded and often substituted
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for the internees names and soon their qualities, building up a close-toperfect universe of digital concision. Internee Roesman no 350 . . . stays
with Tjitrowasono no 1181 . . . collects rations for Djojodoelkadir no 152
and takes his meals with Kromowidjojo no 285.74 In the same file 264 of
the Boven Digoel archive, there is a list of the mentally ill in the camp:
they are recognized as nos. 139, 350, 421, 630, 795, 994, 1198, 1241,
1260, and 1264.
In Boven Digoel one had to listen for ones number. In Terezn, each
inmate had to listen, too, and in addition was made to carry the code of
identity on itself. The generic code, of course, was the yellow star with the
letter J. In Terezn the stars were not tattooed on the skin but sewed on
the clothes in Terezn people still wore their civilian clothes. During
the transports, however, as people were brought to the ghetto or deported
to the east to the death camps, at the crucial moment of the camp when
a (Jewish) individual might get confused his identity questioned
numbers and letters, such as A-3468, were written on a piece of cardboard
and hung around the persons neck. Numbers dangle from their necks;
numbers go with them every step of the way.75
Again, one might wrongly think of animals, of human beings
degraded to the lower stages of civilization: Your brains are just so many
little bells for camels and crocodiles, the sound of your sentences hangs
from you like those bells cattle wear around their necks and which ring
when they come down from the mountains of suggestions.76 Again, one
should rather think of hearing humans poised and individualized, moving in measured steps to the music of the camp. And there was still at least
one next stage.
I often heard about it from the survivors of both camps. A heavy
and gradually overwhelming part of their despair in the camp (as long as
they still were able to feel any) was a fear of losing the number and, with
it, the camp identity in the camp, a fear of becoming a cipher not even a
number, not even the bells cattle wear around their necks, just a cipher:
cipher: 1. A secret or disguised way of writing; a code . . . ; 2. Dated, a zero,
a figure; 0 . . . ; 3. A monogram . . . ; 4. A continuous sounding of an organ
pipe, caused by a mechanical defect.

sss
Even in the camps, people might be given a moment when they might
begin to talk to each other as if there were no camp. Trees might sound
like trees, rivers like rivers, birds like birds, bells like bells, nearnesses like
nearnesses, distances like distances, and people like people. There might
arise the reserve of the invisible.77 A sound might make a listener a part
of the world as it is. The listener might say something responding to the

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sound and become a singular echo within which I hear myself addressing
myself.78 His voice might melt with the sound of the world and in this
way of melting become human, social, and natural.
This is what some describe as radical listening, or as sharing
voices.79 I like to call it thick whisper. The living present resounds,80
and it resounds in a sonorous body.81 At those moments the camp people might became proximate even in Levinass definition quoted above
authentic by being responsible, responsible by being vulnerable and open.
However, these were moments extremely difficult to achieve even when
one really wanted to. It was again a matter of coding. As a Dadaist poet
put it, it is most difficult to learn how to whistle in English.82
The thick whisper, this way of listening and melting voice, lacked
assertiveness. Rarely did it reach even the enclosure of the camp. It got
lost in the camp. If it made it that far, it spent most of its force on the
way. It did not bounce against the enclosure, and it did not bounce back
(this would at least make some defiant sound). The thick whisper lacked
the power of penetration. Even if ever reached the enclosure, it melted
against the enclosure, as if into plush (perfect receptor of the bourgeois
modernity, as we know). 83 It would disappear into the world as it was.
Full and rich, human and worldly as it might be, it would trail away, its
quality diffused, because there is no quality without an extension
underlying it.84
As there was no penetration and not even bouncing against the
enclosure, there was no answer. One had to put lips to the ear of a neighbor in a camp. The thick whisper made the camp people intimate with
each other, but in the same way it locked them even more into the camps
acoustic universe into speaking and listening ultimately to the camp, of
the camp, and by the camp.
The membrane of the enclosure permeated the camp peoples senses
and bodies. The internees mouths, tongues, teeth, lips, and ears became
gadgets of the amazing sound apparatus of the camp a war machine. 85
The machine was the people, and it was made to hear and speak only
when tuned to a certain frequency.
This was why the people of the camps, when they listened and
spoke, even whispered, lips to ear, eventually learned to listen, speak, and
whisper long distance. It is as if they did not wish for their calls to disappear in plush. In the camps even the heavy breathing of the people making love became thin. This is why also the call of the camps as it reaches
us is cold and metallic, silicon hard, defaulted in its volume, sharp in its
pitch, ebb, and flow.
The thick whisper was truly like a heartbeat, but it was merely from
wall to wall. It was rich and full, but it had short legs. 86 Only thinness
could make a call of the camps reach beyond the camps. The thin call
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of the camps, the one sent by the camps to the outside world, and the
response that they received from beyond the enclosure was to be metallic,
not inviting an adhesion, immune to bugs, touching, and other kinds of
disturbances on the way. It was to be immune to the statics of the world.
Fascism is nothing but the abolition of the intractable distance of the
real.87 No dilution.
sss
The acoustic space of the camps could best perform as sound apparatuses.
Whisper and breathing, distance and nearness, voice and hearing made
the best of sense in the camps when set (as if) on a radio dial. Sound
apparatuses, indeed, were at the very center of the camps calling and
camps being.
There were several gramophones in Terezn and in Boven Digoel.
Guards and even some internees brought gramophones to the camps with
them. Gramophone records were played in both camps with only slight
variations, the same music, fox-trots, krontjong, cabaret songs, and opera
arias. Canned sounds were brought to the camps. Preserved sounds of the
outside were listened to. They arrived at the camps through the enclosure
with the enclosure remaining standing.
In 1935 I was nine and for the first time I heard the song Indonesia Raya
[Great Indonesia], from a gramophone record. Uncle Abdul Hamid Lubis
who had been exiled to Digoel from West Sumatra worked the gramophone.
We the Digoel children, who had never seen a gramophone, gathered in the
house of Uncle Kadirun in section B. . . . My younger brother and I sat on
the bench in the front row, next to the children of Uncle Kadirun, Sumono,
and Karno. I watched how Uncle Abdul Hamid Latif picked up a gramophone
needle and fixed the gramophone head at that time I did not know that the
head was called loudspeaker. . . . He lowered the needle to the record, plat
[record in Dutch] . . . and there was the song . . . Indonesia my blood . . .
Indonesia the sublime . . . Indonesia the pure. 88

Radio had an even greater presence in both camps. A small military

telegraph and wireless station was set up in the Boven Digoel camp at the
very outset. It was for official use only, but the news trickled down and
among the internees. Two brigades of infantry needed comma . . . hospital second class under a captain comma . . . military radio station under
a lieutenant comma.89
In Terezn, the death penalty was established for listening to the radio.
Nobody, as far as it is known, was ever caught. However, and the more so,
the space of the ghetto was saturated with radio radio rumors, that is.
The radio rumors, an especially powerful form of the true tram conductor stories, traveled in the ghetto from mouth to mouth von Mund
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zu Mund. People called it Mundfunk,90 from Rundfunk (radio broadcast

in German) rund meaning around and Funk meaning a sparkle.
There were rumors of an illegal radio receiver assembled in the Terezn ghetto.91 Any news was most believable when spread from this (perhaps never- existing) machine. An SS officer ordered the ghetto workshop
to build a conference table combining radio table and flower table.92
Radio was overheard when someone from the ghetto was let out under
guard to work in the garden along the outer side of the wall:
I am assigned to pick up linden tree blossoms. . . . Right nearby is a little
house belonging to some gravedigger. . . . I can hear a radio coming from
inside that little house, something I havent heard for a very long time.93
We look toward the tops of distant mountains . . . from a house of the director of agriculture who works in the ghetto, when a window is open, we can
hear music on a radio.94

Radio was made indeed in the camp, of the stuff that was in the
ghetto, mainly of desire. On the list of performances in the ghetto are
a play by Norbert Fryd . . . On Radio Waves around the World in a Second.95
Radio Reportage from Terezn . . . an imaginary radio- event with announcer,
chorus and separate voices.96

In the most significant musical production of the ghetto, in Viktor

Ullman and Peter Kiens opera The Emperor of Atlantis or The Disobedience of Death (the opera was ready to go on stage, but before the premiere
virtually everyone, the authors and the actors, were sent to Auschwitz),
radio or radio-like machines played and sang the star human roles.
The Loudspeaker before the curtain: Hallo, Hallo, we begin! . . . The Emperor
of Atlantis keeps connection with his ministers through telephone and radio: . . .
The latest news about Death: People cannot die. Old and sick are sentenced
to eternal torments. . . . The Emperor sits at his desk and before him is a microphone and a switchboard. Behind the Emperor can be seen a funnel of a loudspeaker. The Emperor: What time is it? Loudspeaker: Thirty-two minutes
after five. . . . Statement on the radio: Death is still undecided. . . . Finale
Quartet: Loudspeaker, Girl, Pierrot, and Drummer before the curtain: Come
Death, our honored guest.97

sss
The thin call travels infinitely farther than any thick whisper ever can. No
enclosure is strong enough to block it, and, when one really listens, it is as

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if there was no enclosure at all as if there were even no camps at all. The
whole world becomes the amazing machine.
The thin call liberates the listening world from a thick messiness
and from the threat of sharing of voice and everything that may be
coming from the camps. New and thin space emerges that makes no
difference camp or noncamp, place and nonplace. From wherever one
may listen or call, on whichever side of any enclosure one listens or speaks,
one becomes a captive of the call.
Notes
1. Ruth Bondy, Elder of the Jews Jacob Edelstein of Theresienstadt, trans. Evelyn Abel (New York: Grove Press, 1989), 250.
2. Elena Makarova, Sergei Makarov, and Victor Kuperman, University over
the Abyss: The Story behind 520 Lecturers and 2,430 Lectures in KZ Theresienstadt
1942 1945 (Jerusalem: Verba, 2004), 24.
3. Job 3:17 19, qtd. in Philippe Nemo, Job and the Excess of Evil, trans. Michal
Kigel (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1998), 105.
4. Bondy, Elder of the Jews, 330 31.
5. Philipp Manes, Als obs ein Leben wr: Tatsachenbericht Theresienstadt
1942 1944, ed. Ben Barkow and Klaus Leist (Berlin: Ullstein, 2005), 219. Unless
otherwise noted, translations throughout this article are the authors.
6. I. F. M. Salim, Vijftien jaar Boven- Digoel, concentratiekamp in NieuwGuinea: bakermat van de Indonesische Onafhankelijkheid, 2nd ed. (1876; repr., Hengelo, the Netherlands: NV Uitgeverij Smit van, 1980), 111.
7. Ibid.
8. Yusuf Mawengkang, Pimpinan Umum Perintis Kemerdekaan. Boven
Digoel: Sebuah Cerita Anak Bbuangan (unpublished typescript in the authors
posession, Jakarta, 1996), 148.
9. Jean-Luc Nancy, Listening, trans. Charlotte Mandell (New York: Fordham
University Press, 2007), 46.
10. This and all the following dictionary quotes are from Aa Dictionary (Apple
2005 7), on my Mac OS X.
11. Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, 3rd ed., 3 vols. (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 3:1040 41.
12. Anton Chekhov, Sakhalin Island, trans. Brian Reeve (London: Oneworld
Classics, 2007), 355n.
13. Relays along the Siberia road, [were] surrounded by a palisade of sharppointed stakes and consisted of three single- storied buildings standing in the middle
of the enclosure. Leo Tolstoy, Resurrection, trans. Rosemary Edmonds (London:
Penguin Books, 1966), 488.
14. Ernst Bloch, Traces, trans. Anthony A. Nassar (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 2006), 59.
15. Manes, Als obs ein Leben wr, 462n2.
16. Gonda Redlich, The Terezin Diary of Gonda Redlich, ed. Saul S. Friedman,
trans. Laurence Kutler (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1992), 9.
17. Pavel Weiner, A Boy in Terezn: The Private Diary of Pavel Weiner, April
1944 April 1945, ed. Karen Weiner, trans. Paul (Pavel) Weiner, with introduc-

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tion and notes by Debrah Dwork (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press,
2012), 157.
18. Louis- Ferdinand Cline, Rigadoon, trans. Ralph Mannheim (London:
Dalkey Archive Press, 2008), 95 96.
19. Salim, Vijftien jaar, 237.
20. The sailors name was Soekardjo Prawirojoedo. See Koesalah Soebagyo
Toer, Tanah Merah Yang Merah: Sebuah Catatan Sejarah (Bandung, Indonesia: Ultimus, 2010), 108; and Karel Steenbrink, The Spectacular Growth of a Self- Confident
Minority, 1903 1942, vol. 2 of Catholics in Indonesia, 1808 1942: A Documented History, with the cooperation of Paule Maas (Leiden: KITLV Press, 2007), 251.
21. Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth- Century
French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 508.
22. Bloch, Traces, 51.
23. Ibid.
24. Nancy, Listening, 78 80.
25. The departing into which presence actually withdraws, beating its sense
in accordance with this parting. Jean- Luc Nancy, Noli me tangere: On the Raising
of the Body, trans. Sarah Clift, Pascale-Anne Brault, and Michael Naas (New York:
Fordham University Press, 2008), 15.
26. Marco Kartodikromo, Pergaulan Orang Buangan di Boven- Digoel (Jakarta:
Gramedia, 2002), 24.
27. Toer, Tanah Merah, 52, 101, 106, 133.
28. Salim, Vijftien jaar, 305.
29. At first it was easy to get away. . . . But it was difficult to hide in Bohemia.
Zdenek Lederer, Ghetto Theresienstadt (London: Edward Goldston, 1953), 61.
30. Bondy, Elder of the Jews, 261 62.
31. Dagboek v/d Politie i/h Interneeringskamp. v.a 4 Mei 1935 t/m 21 Juli
1935, file 211, Boven Digoel Archives, National Archives, Jakarta.
32. 9 April 1936 t/m 25 September 1936, file 212, Boven Digoel Archives.
33. Margaret J. Kartomi, The Gamelan Digul (Rochester, NY: University of
Rochester Press, 2002), 32. The instruments were transported to Australia at the
same time as the internees; they survived (and I was allowed to see and even touch
them at the Gamelan Room of the Monash University in Clayton, Australia).
34. Salim, Vijftien jaar, 113.
35. Ibid., 108.
36. Stages emerged in the most impossible places, especially in the lofts . . . in
empty offices and former sheds and horse stables. Alice Bloemendahl, Theresienstadt with a Difference, 02/452 no. 580, Yad Vashem Archives, Jerusalem, Israel,
and P.III.h. (Theresienstadt), no. 580, 4, Wiener Library, London.
37. Quoted in Makarova et al., University, 216.
38. There is no physical time in music. . . . Husserl uses the paradigm of
listening to a melody. He analyses how the present of this perception is a present
formed by the overlapping, in it or on it, of the present impression and the retention
of the past impression, opening forward onto the impression to come. It is a present,
consequently, that is not instantaneous, but differential in itself . . . what Husserl calls
the living present. Nancy, Listening, 18 19.
39. Bondy, Elder of the Jews, 345. For a photograph of a Terezn ghetto
orchestra, see photo no. 32650, Yad Vashem Archives.
40. Privileged until Further Notice, in Ruth Bondy, Trapped: Essays on the
History of the Czech Jews, 1939 1943 (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2008), 102.
41. On Heideggers groundedness of memory, see Todd Samuel Presner,
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Mobile Modernity: Germans, Jews, Trains (New York: Columbia University Press,
2007), 19, 43 44.
42. Nancy, Listening, 75n42.
43. Louis-Ferdinand Cline, Journey to the End of the Night, trans. Ralph
Mannheim (New York: New Directions, 2006), 194.
44. The mass of us internees as a consequence of loneliness and nostalgia
crumbled to ruin. Salim, Vijftien jaar, 153.
45. Moestika, 6 May 1933, in Overzicht van de Inlandsche en Maleisch- Chineesche
Pers [IPO] (Weltevreden, Batavia: Kantoor voor de Volkslectuur, 1933), n.p.
46. Quoted in Joshua L. Miller, Accented America: The Cultural Politics of Multilingual Modernism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 150.
47. Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture (New York: Dover, 1986), 50.
48. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan
Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 142.
49. Quoted in Makarova et al., University, 24.
50. Emmanuel Levinas, Of God Who Comes to Mind, trans. Bettina Bergo
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 80, 12 13.
51. Ibid., 91.
52. Aage Krarup Nielsen, In het Land van Kannibalen en Paradijsvogels, trans.
Claudine Bienfait (Amsterdam: Querido, 1930), 102 3.
53. Salim, Vijftien jaar, 85.
54. Ibid., 248.
55. Bloch, Traces, 41.
56. Nielsen, In het Land van Kannibalen, 101.
57. Salim, Vijftien jaar, 111.
58. Herman Melville, Moby- Dick: or, The Whale (London: Penguin Books,
2001), 574.
59. Nielsen, In het Land van Kannibalen, 122.
60. Entry for 7 July 1912, from a visit to Halle, in a supplemental travel diary
entitled Trip to Weimar and Jungborn, 1912, in Franz Kafka, The Diaries of Franz
Kafka 1914 1923, vol. 2, ed. Max Brod, trans. Martin Greenberg, with the cooperation of Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books), 302.
61. Sura xxviii THE NEWS, The Koran, trans. J. M. Rodwell (1909; repr.
London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1953), 52.
62. Jean-Luc Nancy, Dis- Enclosure: The Deconstruction of Christianity, trans.
Bettina Bergo, Gabriel Malefant, and Michael B. Smith (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 86.
63. Minggu Kliwon Tanggerang, in Trikoyo: cerita digul cerita buru (unpublished manuscript in the possession of the author, 28 January 2007). See also
Widayasih, Masa kanak- kanak (unpublished manuscript in the possession of the
author, n.d.), 1:14 15.
64. Kamis Kliwon Tanggerang, 14 March 2008, in Trikoyo: cerita digul cerita
buru.
65. Louis Althusser, Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses, in Lenin
and Philosophy and Other Essay, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review
Press, 1971), 163.
66. Anonymous, Ghetto Cops, in We Are Children Just the Same: Vedem,
the Secret Magazine by the Boys of Terezn, ed. Paul R. Wilson (Philadelphia: Jewish
Publication Society, 1995), 120.
67. Hans Gnther Adler, Theresienstadt: Das Antlitz einer Zwangsgemeinschaft,
3 vols. (Gttingen: Wallstein, 2005), 2:256.
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68. Leben in T von Mrs. Else Dormitzer, London (September 1945), P.III.h
(T) no. 560 YVA 02/392, 1, Wiener Library.
69. Manes, Als obs ein Leben wr, 317.
70. Josef Roth to Stefan Zweig, in Michael Hofmann, Joseph Roth: Going
over the Edge, New York Review of Books, 22 December 2011, 80.
71. Roman Jakobson, Child Language Aphasia and Phonological Universals
(1941; repr., The Hague: Mouton, 1968), 25.
72. The same considerations are valid mutatis mutandis for aphasic speech
disturbances. Ibid., 31.
73. In 1961 after a visit to Tbingen, where Friedrich Hlderlin endured his
mental deterioration into silence, Paul Celan wrote, He / could / only babble and
babble, / ever-, ever- / moremore. / (Pollaksch. Pollaksch.) / . . . pollaksch the nonsense word that Hlderlin repeated. Luis Prez- Oramas, Len Ferrari and Mira
Schendel: Tangled Alphabets, in Len Ferrari and Mira Schendel: Tangled Alphabets,
ed. David Frankel (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2009), 34.
74. Document signed Wakil kampong (deputy head of a section), Boven
Digoel, 28 February 1932, file 264, Boven Digoel Archives.
75. Jir Weil, Colors, trans. Rachel Harrell (Ann Arbor: Michigan Slavic Publications, 2002), 53.
76. Jesus Christ Rastaquoure [1920], in Francis Picabia, I Am a Beautiful Monster: Poetry, Prose, and Provocation, trans. Marc Lowenthal (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 2007), 227.
77. Maurice Blanchot, qtd. in Roland Barthes, The Neutral: Lecture Course at
the Collge de France (1977 1978), trans. Rosalind E. Krauss and Denis Hollier (New
York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 93.
78. Nancy, Noli me tangere, 9.
79. On radical listening and sharing voice, see Luce Irigaray, The Way of
Love, trans. Heidi Bostic and Stephan Pluhcek (London: Continuum, 2002), 48.
80. Nancy, Listening, 18 19.
81. Ibid., 6 8, paraphrasing Charles Rosens The Frontiers of Meaning (1994).
82. Slack Days, in Picabia, Beautiful Monster, 340.
83. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 20, 121, 222.
84. Gilles Deleuze, Desert Islands and Other Texts, 1953 1974, trans. Michael
Taormina (Paris: Semiotext(e), 2002), 96.
85. On language as a war machine, see ibid., 254.
86. For example, in the Chinese doctrine of Wou-wei, the melting of breath
(lianqi) is superior to the control of breath (xingqui). Barthes, Neutral, 176.
87. Nancy, Dis- Enclosure, 137.
88. Tanggerang, 5 January 2006, Trikoyo: cerita digul cerita buru (italics in
original).
89. 25 November 1926 aan den Landvoogd no. 1060 referte telegram 24 deze
no 1281 Amboina, MvO Tideman Hoofdstuk XXXVII NG, National Archives,
The Hague.
90. Manes, Als obs ein Leben wr, 268, 338.
91. E.g., Bondy, Elder of the Jews, 303.
92. Adler, Theresienstadt, 2:428.
93. Entry for Thursday, 20 July 1944, Paul [Pavel] Weiner, Terezn Remembered (paper presented at the University of North Carolina Humanities Program
Seminar, Chapel Hill, 10 May 2005), 97.

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94. Manes, Als obs ein Leben wr, 69.

95. Eva ormov, Divadlo v Terezne 1941/1945 (st nad Labem, Czechoslovakia: Severocesk Nakladatelstv, 1973), 75.
96. Makarova et al., University, 367.
97. DER KONIG VON ATLANTIS oder DER TOD DANKT AB. Legende in Vier Bilden. Text: Peter Kien. Musik: Viktor Ullmann, 72/70, Yad Vashem
Archives.

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