Gross-Rosen

Opened in August 1940 as a subcamp of Sachsenhausen near a quarry in Lower Silesia, the Gross-Rosen concentration camp was to expand into a large camp complex with a vast network of its own subcamps.  The approximately 26,000 women imprisoned here made it a labour camp with one of the highest concentrations of female prisoners.  While conditions in the women's camps were marginally better than those in the men's camps, women were also forced to perform hard manual labour in factories, construction and agriculture. In all, some 40,000 people died here, most of them Jews.  Of those who survived, the most famous were those rescued by Oskar Schindler, a Nazi businessman who saved the lives of many of those he hired to work in his munitions factory, and who were eventually deported to a subcamp at Gross-Rosen. The SS sent prisoners from other camps, including Auschwitz-Birkenau, on death marches, arriving at Gross-Rosen throughout the autumn of 1944. In January 1945, the Soviet advance led to the evacuation of the subcamps of Gross-Rosen before the main camp in February 1945 and its liberation on the 13th of that month.

Music was part of daily life in Gross-Rosen. Frequently on Sundays there were performances incorporating theatrical skits and music.  These variety shows were often accompanied by a three-piece band and a singer. Despite the context, these concerts were enormously popular with the prisoner audience. There is also evidence that the SS ordered cultural events for the purpose of distracting the camp population. One forced concert took place on a Sunday afternoon in the summer of 1943, when

all the prisoners had to come in off the street into their barracks.  In our room the block elder ordered us to cover the windows and to sing loudly ... as it became dark and we were allowed to stop singing, we opened the curtains and saw tongues of flame rising from the crematorium chimney.  One could smell the odour of burnt flesh.  The next morning the rumour spread throughout camp that two truckloads of Polish partisans had been brought to the camp and liquidated.

This use of music to conceal the horrors of the camp continued until the war’s end.

A .50 RM piece of scrip from the Gross Rosen concentration camp that was given to Hanka Granek during her imprisonment at the Peterswaldau sub-camp of Gross Rosen, 1944. USHMM, courtesy of Hanka Granek Ehrlich.

Sources

Fackler, G., 2000. "Des Lagers Stimme"– Musik im KZ. Alltag und Häftlingskultur in den Konzentrationslagern 1933 bis 1936, Bremen: Temmen.  

Langbein, H., 1994. Against All Hope: Resistance in the Nazi Concentration Camps, 1938-45, New York: Paragon House.  

Weinreich, R. ed., 2002. Verachtet, verfolgt, vergessen:Leiden und Widerstand der Zeugen Jehovas in der Grenzregion am Hochrhein im "Dritten Reich", Hausern: Signum Design. 

Five-sided badge issued to Helen Waterford identifying her as a prisoner from the Kratzau-Chrastava labor camp, a satellite camp of Gross Rosen. Waterford was interned at the camp from October 1944 to May 1945. USHMM (N00098), courtesy of Helen Waterford.

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