Lived Experience and the Holocaust: Spaces, Senses and Emotions in Auschwitz
Journal of the British Academy, 9, 27–58 DOI https://doi.org/10.5871/jba/009.027 Posted 15 January 2021 Lived experience and the Holocaust: spaces, senses and emotions in Auschwitz Nikolaus Wachsmann Elie Kedourie Memorial Lecture, read 17 October 2018 Abstract: This article examines lived experience during the Holocaust, focusing on Auschwitz, the most lethal Nazi concentration camp. It draws on spatial history, as well as the history of senses and emotions, to explore subjective being in Auschwitz. The article suggests that a more explicit engagement with individual spaces—prisoner bunks, barracks, latrines, crematoria, construction sites, SS offices—and their emotional and sensory dimension, can reveal elements of lived experience that have remained peripheral on the edges of historical visibility. Such an approach can deepen understanding of Auschwitz, by making the camp more recognisable and by contributing to wider historiographical debates about the nature of Nazi terror. Keywords: Auschwitz, Holocaust, concentration camps, lived experience, spatial history, history of the senses, history of emotions. Note on the author: Nikolaus Wachsmann is Professor for Modern European History at Birkbeck College (University of London), and has written extensively about repression and terror in the Third Reich. His most recent book is KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps (2015, Farrar, Straus and Giroux), which won the Wolfson History Prize, the Mark Lynton History Prize and the Jewish-Quarterly Wingate Literary Prize. © The author(s) 2021. This is an open access article licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 Unported License 28 Nikolaus Wachsmann ‘Dear reader, I write these words in the moments of my greatest despair.’ So begins a text by Zalmen Gradowski, composed in Auschwitz-Birkenau in spring 1944 and dis- covered after liberation, in a tin near the destroyed crematoria.
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