Sound and vision blog

On 11 March 1946 Hanns Alexander arrested Rudolf Höss, a German SS officer who was the longest-serving commandant of Auschwitz. Hanns, who was born in Berlin in 1917, fled Nazi persecution in the late 1930s because he was Jewish. He fled to England with his parents and siblings, and joined the British Army as soon as he could.

Image copyright: Courtesy of Alexander Family Archive.

In May 1945 Hanns was an interpreter at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where he helped British army officials interrogate Nazis and their collaborators on their involvement in the Holocaust. Hanns then decided to become a Nazi hunter, using his skills to track down and arrest Nazis who had so far evaded capture.

Listen to Hanns Alexander

Download Hanns Alexander transcript

Audio copyright: British Library. Recorded and donated by Herbert Levy.

In this clip from an interview with Herbert Levy in 1996 (British Library reference: C958/03), Hanns describes how he and his colleagues searched for Rudolf for several months. They eventually found him by tracking letters that he and his wife were sending one another. Hanns recalls how Rudolf initially denied being the commandant of Auschwitz and instead claimed he was a gardener called Franz Lang. However, Rudolf’s wedding ring gave him away, because it had his and his wife’s initials, along with their wedding date.

Hanns tells Herbert that capturing Rudolf was one of his greatest victories. Learn more about Hanns and his life through the Voices of the Holocaust leaning resource.

This week’s post comes from Charlotte James, Web Content Developer for Unlocking Our Sound Heritage.

Artist Sophie Herxheimer, creator of the artwork for the British Library’s new Voices of the Holocaust website, reflects on her approach to contextualising and representing the voices of Holocaust survivors.

This collection of interviews with Holocaust survivors encompasses themes of war, suffering, imprisonment, exile and loss. But there are also things that made me laugh, many surprises, sharply conjured memories and images - and a lot of detailed insight about Britain, and its relationships with refugees and European politics, much of which still resonates today.

The British Library’s learning team approached me about the idea of creating a different way in to this dark chapter of history: something to replace the grainy photographs of hollow-eyed victims of atrocity that so often accompany this type of material.

We discussed how we could better reflect the dignity, courage and long term contributions of the people in these interviews, their often long and settled lives in the UK – their legacy as parents, workers, friends and neighbours, whose identities were not ossified in victim mode.

We thought of the liveliness of these extraordinary testimonies which help to shed light on who we all are, and what really happened, as well as the contribution these immigrants made to post war British culture.

My father, aunt and grandparents arrived in London in November 1938 from Berlin, saved by an inventive job offer for my doctor grandfather, from the hastily set up Council for Academic Refugees (it’s still going!). The family spoke German at home in North London, but never spoke of Germany or the war years. Nor was our Jewishness referred to, we were head-down, assimilated, secular Londoners; on my mum’s side too, though her forebears were from a much earlier wave of immigrants from Russia.

My first step towards realising the commission was to listen. The next steadying thought I had was to devise a palette that would immediately suggest an atmosphere, and use colour to loosen any oppressive sense of worthiness, horror or ‘explanation’. I mixed gouaches based on the furnishings that I remembered from my paternal grandparents’ house. It had a strong middle European flavour, with its whiskery upholstery, heavy wooden furniture and fern green window frames. 

Coffee was a colour too. So was herring, paprika and beer. I painted paper in these shades and went through my collage scrap bags for period ephemera. (I hoard scraps, like any self-respecting child of a refugee.) I found pages from 1930s journals, family letters and postcards that I have in a beribboned bundle, some books written in German Gothic script that I’ve picked up on scourings of charity shops and cupboards.

I began to compile and cut out images for each themed banner, paying careful attention to the voices and their stories...

1. 'My dad was still shaving...'

Henry Kuttner remembers the November Pogrom of 1938

Download Henry Kuttner transcript

2. 'Quite a big troop ship...'

Willy Field on being sent to Australia

Download Willy Field transcript

3. ‘You could smell - rotten cabbages - and beetroot...'

Edith Birkin on conditions in the Łódź Ghetto

Download Edith Birkin transcript

I was searching not only for particular images from the recordings but also for vocal tone and texture, e.g. hesitation, indignation, mirth, age, accent. These were all keys to the sensations I wanted to convey (texture is an essential tool when making work to be seen online). 

I like to fight the flatness of the screen with chunky textural heft. It’s another enlivening way to disrupt the surface and get beneath it. I composed the banners with reference to a mid-century graphic aesthetic - a lot of which was pioneered in the Bauhaus, during Germany’s short-lived, but eternally influential, Weimar period.

Using photocopied strips cut from family correspondence, with its fluent handwriting in varied scripts and gestures, as well as the soft ephemerality of its faded paper, added immediate authenticity, as well as offering structure to my collages. I used the writing to make the shapes of stripes, rays, squares and buildings.

I could cut figures from different pieces of found material, e.g. a ‘situations wanted’ page of The Times, 1939: “Educated Viennese Jewess seeks domestic work…” or a page from a child’s comic my father had grown up reading, which was seamless Nazi propaganda written into sentimental stories about ‘sacrifice’ and ‘the fatherland’. I also used scraps of printed wrapping papers if they seemed evocative, or had adjacent colours, or suggested period through pattern.

I hope by making these collages from largely discarded materials, to also echo in a small way the resourcefulness and practicality of the people in the recordings, who had to use whatever they could find, including imagination, to emerge from the horrors of war and persecution.

Sophie Herxheimer
March 2023

In belated celebration of the International Day of Women and Girls in Science (February 11), this week’s selection comes from Emmeline Ledgerwood, Voices of Science Web Coordinator.

In 2005 the Athena Swan Charter was launched to encourage higher education and research institutions to support the advancement of women working in STEMM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics and medicine). This accreditation scheme is now recognised across the globe as a framework for organisations in all sectors to demonstrate their efforts towards addressing gender equality in the workplace.

The charter was the brainchild of the Scientific Women’s Academic Network (SWAN), a grouping of women scientists from across the UK who had first come together as a result of the Athena project. The Athena Project was set up in 1999 and worked in partnership with universities and leading professional and learned science societies to make a difference to women’s careers in science. Its early work focused on developing mentoring, networks and career development programmes for women scientists, followed by surveys of career progression.

In 2011, Professor Dame Julia Higgins was interviewed by Thomas Lean for the National Life Stories collection ‘An Oral History of British Science’. The full recording and transcript are available online at BL Sounds.

Listen to Dame Julia Higgins

Download Julia Higgins interview transcript

Higgins is a polymer scientist and physicist who pioneered innovative methods to study the structure, organisation and movement of polymers. As a young woman she held research posts in France before joining the Chemical Engineering Department at Imperial College, London, in 1976. Over the course of her forty-year career there, culminating in her position as Principal of the Faculty of Engineering, she also served as Foreign Secretary and Vice-President of the Royal Society and Chair of the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council.

Above: Image supplied by Julia Higgins in 2011. 

In this clip, Higgins describes how her own career progression by the mid-1990s gave her a level of influence in the higher education sector that she leveraged to improve the careers of other women in science. The result was the Athena project with its far-reaching legacy for women working in STEMM.

Browse the Voices of Science website to find extracts from interviews with many other women scientists interviewed for National Life Stories at the British Library.

This week’s post comes from Charlotte James, Web Content Developer for Unlocking Our Sound Heritage.

In August 1947, Gurbakhsh Singh Garcha learned about the Partition of India over his uncle’s radio. Gurbakhsh was a young boy living in a small village north of Delhi when officials announced that British India would be divided into India and Pakistan.

On 14 August Pakistan was created, with Muhammad Ali Jinnah as the country’s first Governor-General. On 15 August India became an independent country and Jawaharlal Nehru became its first prime minister. Sir Cyril Radcliffe, under the guidance of Lord Louis Mountbatten (the last Viceroy to British India), demarcated the boundary lines for the two new countries.

Listen to Gurbakhsh Singh Garcha

Download Gurbakhsh Singh Garcha transcript

In this clip from an interview with Kavita Puri in 2017 (British Library reference: C1790/20), Gurbakhsh discusses how many people were worried about Partition and how they learned about it. When Kavita asks how villagers got their news, Gurbakhsh replies that they mostly learned things through posters and literature that political parties published and distributed. Gurbakhsh remembers that around 50 people gathered at his uncle’s house to listen to the Partition announcement because he was the only person in the village who owned a radio. He recalls people worrying about where the partition boundary would fall and on which side big cities, like Lahore, would end up. Today, with our constant access to the news, it is difficult to imagine 50 people gathering around one radio to hear such an important announcement.

Learn more about Partition and listen to other oral testimonies surrounding this historic event on the British Library’s Voices of Partition online learning resource.

Audio and Image copyright: BBC.

This week’s selection comes from Giulia Baldorilli, Sound and Vision Reference Specialist. 

Photo by Ahmad Odeh on Unsplash.

In this 1991 interview from the collection ‘ICA talks’ (C95/795), the renowned artist and dancer Trisha Brown considers the experience and exploration of gravity in her works, and discusses the role of gender in improvised partnering performances. 

Listen to Trisha Brown

Download Trisha Brown transcript

Years ago I used to practice contact improvisation, a movement technique and art dance style that originated in downtown New York in the late sixties.

The central idea of contact improvisation is around finding the body’s balance in relation to the partner by sharing weight and touch; forms and movements are thus created when the bodies meet, initiated and transformed by the music or simply by vocal instructions.

Movement awareness is intrinsically related to how much information we can gather from other people’s bodies, through the constant dialogic sharing of touch points. There are no rules, only bodies listening to each other in their search for a shared centre of gravity.

Trisha was one of these pioneering artists who explored the idea of what kind of movement can be improvised in a dance.¹

An interesting point that Trisha considers is around the importance of physical strength and gender roles in this improvised dance: how much of the silent communication of movements is in fact created by the male partner?

Ultimately, it makes me wonder how much we are aware, in the process of making, of who is the final ‘creator’ of a performance.

---

[1] Nancy Stark Smith, 'Harvest: One history of contact improvisation', Contact Quarterly, The Place Issue, 32/2 (2006): https://contactquarterly.com/cq/unbound/view/harvest-a-history-of-ci#$.

By Dr Madeline White, Curator of Oral History.

Reflecting on the Holocaust Memorial Day 2023 theme of 'ordinary people', I wondered what – if anything – the word 'ordinary' meant to the people who survived the genocide. In a time that was by all accounts extra-ordinary, what value does the word 'ordinary' have in talking about it? Who do the survivors think of as 'ordinary people' in the context of their own persecution?

The British Library Sound Archive is home to more than 600 Holocaust oral testimonies. The word 'ordinary' appears with surprising frequency in them.

But interestingly, there is no consensus between them on who the 'ordinary people' are.

Some survivors identify themselves – and the Jewish people in general – as the 'ordinary people'. Ivan Cybula does so in the opening moments of his 1988 interview.

Ivan Cybula on his place of birth [BL REF C410/032]

Download Ivan Cybula transcript

For Ivan, there was nothing extraordinary about his family; they lived modest, working lives, in keeping with the lives led by many other Jewish communities in Eastern Europe. The picture that Ivan paints of an 'ordinary' family in an 'ordinary' community that largely kept itself to itself sets the scene for what we know follows: a community that would be persecuted and ultimately murdered as a perceived anomaly, before Ivan had barely entered adulthood.

Other survivors draw a distinction between themselves and the non-Jewish people around them, but instead characterise non-Jewish people as 'ordinary' and themselves – or the notion of being Jewish – as some kind of other. Here, Eric Bluh talks about working in Bournemouth, England after the war. He describes his fractured relationship with an employer, who despite being Jewish themselves, did not think he lived up to the standards they expected of a Jew.

Eric Bluh on working in Bournemouth [BL REF C410/057]

Download Eric Bluh transcript

Eric describes himself as behaving ‘like an ordinary person without Jewish ways’ as a way of distinguishing himself from the Jewish stereotype, demonstrating in the process that the persistent ‘othering’ of Jewish people which had underscored the Holocaust continued into the post-war period, and beyond continental Europe..

Elsewhere, we hear survivors speak of their persecutors as 'ordinary people', making the same argument that scholars such as Christopher Browning and Hannah Arendt set out eloquently in their historical analyses: that genocides are not simply perpetrated by 'evil' people, but often ordinary people who under certain conditions are capable of making evil choices. By emphasising the ordinariness of their tormentors, the survivors challenge us to make sense of the extraordinariness of their actions. In the following clip, Naomi Blake describes the German soldiers who attempted to bury her alive as 'in normal circumstances law-abiding, good people, professional people':

Naomi Blake on digging a grave [BL REF C410/076]

Download Naomi Blake transcript

The outcome is not to absolve perpetrators of their responsibility or to underplay the severity of their crimes, but instead the opposite: to emphasise the extent to which their crimes lay beyond comprehension, yet firmly in the realm of the everyday possible.

The word 'ordinary' appears as an adjective to describe many other types of people and circumstances in survivor narratives. Heidi Fischer - who hid as a child in Hungary under Christian papers - describes sitting on a train listening to 'ordinary people - peasants and suchlike […] talking about the Jews […] in a very awfully derogative manner' (BL ref C410/088). In stark contrast, Alice Schwab speaks of 'the help, and the love, and the kindness, from ordinary people' she received after arriving in England in 1937 (BL ref C410/089).

In his 1989 interview, the interviewer asks Henry Kohn to describe 'an ordinary day' in the Czeldź ghetto (BL ref C410/002).

What does this tell us?

It tells us that the Holocaust was an event perpetrated and experienced by ordinary people. Though used in different contexts, the word almost always serves to emphasise the extremity of the situation, or the incomprehensibility of people's choices. After all, the word 'ordinary' only has meaning if the word 'extra-ordinary' can be used to describe something outside of its boundaries.

In speaking of the event in these terms, the survivors force us to see ourselves in their stories, at all stages and in all parts of the narrative. Believing ourselves to be 'ordinary people' is no longer a valid defence, a reason to believe that it couldn't happen to us or by us or under our watch. By describing those involved as ordinary - perpetrators, bystanders, and the persecuted alike - the survivors confront us with the possibility that, in fact, it could.

When asked whether he thought the history of the Holocaust ought to be shared, Michael Lee responded that the lessons must be learned precisely because of how ordinary those involved were:

Michael Lee describes experiencing antisemitism in Britain [BL REF C410/014]

Download Michael Lee transcript

Michael made these observations in an interview given in 1989. One might ask what he would think now about the parallels between the past and the present day, 34 years later.

Follow @BL_OralHistory and @soundarchive for all the latest news.

Madeline White is the Curator of Oral History at the British Library. She holds an MA and PhD in Holocaust Studies from Royal Holloway, University of London, where she conducted extensive research into the history of archival collections of Holocaust testimony in Britain and Canada. 

This Disability History Month, staff from across the British Library have collaborated on a series of blog posts to highlight stories of disability and disabled people in the Library’s collections. Each week a curator will showcase an item from the collections and present it alongside commentary from a member of the British Library’s staff Disability Support Network. These selections are a snapshot insight into the Library’s holdings of disability stories, and we invite readers to use these as a starting point to explore the collections further and share your findings with us.

This selection has been made by Dr Madeline White, Oral History Curator.

Photo by K. Mitch Hodge on Unsplash

The theme of UK Disability History Month (UKDHM) 2022 is Disability, Health and Well Being. The theme was chosen to shed light on the societal barriers that compromise the health and wellbeing of disabled people. In particular, it seeks to highlight the ways in which the Covid-19 pandemic exacerbated many of these inequalities.

The UKDHM website draws together some of the research into the impact of the pandemic on disabled people and communities. Reports and statistical analyses reveal above average rates of preventable death, exacerbated mental health issues, and increased isolation and poverty among disabled people. This excessive suffering was not inevitable, but the result of structural inequality, discrimination, poor communication and government action.

The oral history collections at the British Library offer us an opportunity to explore beyond the statistics and hear people’s lived experiences and emotions. We can use oral history, for example, to listen to disabled people describe their experiences of living through the pandemic, in their own words. In doing so, we can begin to get a sense of the human impacts of policy decisions and ableist attitudes.

The Voices of Our National Health Service collection – now archived at the British Library – comprises thousands of interviews recorded by the University of Manchester between 2017 and 2022. Given its sheer scale and scope, the collection offers an unparalleled insight into healthcare provision in the UK as experienced by patients, staff and communities across the country – including during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Within this collection are hundreds of stories that speak to the UKDHM theme of ‘Disability, Health and Wellbeing’. Individuals with pre-existing health conditions or disabilities designated ‘Extremely Clinically Vulnerable’ by the government describe their experiences of shielding during lockdowns. In other recordings, patients experiencing long Covid symptoms describe the lasting impact of their new illness on their day to day lives. Throughout, these interviewees explore how their health needs were at times met and at others missed by government public health policy, by the medical profession, and by the communities they live in.

Photo courtesy of Stephen Lightbown.  Image not licensed for reuse. 

Stephen Lightbown is one such interviewee. Stephen was a Director of Communications in the NHS until March 2020, when he took early retirement on health grounds. In his interview, Stephen reflects on life as a wheelchair user before and during the pandemic, exploring the extent to which society has adapted – or failed to adapt – to meet his needs and the needs of other disabled people over time.

In this first clip, Stephen recalls some of the discrimination he encounters in his daily life as a wheelchair user and some of the ways in which the pandemic exposed the ableist attitudes that are prevalent in UK society.

Stephen Lightbown on ableist attitudes of society being laid bare during the pandemic [BL REF C1887/700]

Download Stephen Lightbown on ableist attitudes - transcript

In addition to recording personal experiences at various intersections of disability and healthcare, the Voices of Our National Health Service collection offers an insight into individual wellbeing in the context of a global health crisis and beyond. Within the collection, people with disabilities describe how the pandemic and the measures to combat it impacted on their wellbeing. In this next clip, Stephen offers an illuminating perspective on access to social events. He argues that the swift move to online events during lockdown undermines the oft-made argument that providing regular access for disabled people to events and spaces is often too expensive or too difficult.

Stephen Lightbown on accessing events online during the pandemic [BL REF C1800/700]

Download Stephen Lightbown on accessing events - transcript

The nature of oral history as a methodology means the material it produces often offers unmatched insight into events as experienced by individuals, many of whom would not otherwise record their stories or be represented in the historical record. The Voices of Our National Health Service collection in particular has preserved for posterity raw and honest accounts of the pandemic from those who experienced it at its most extreme, of whom disabled people represent a significant demographic.

As the British Library and other archives continue to collect oral history material in the future, we will capture more stories from disabled people about their lives, including experiences of the pandemic. The legacy of the pandemic and its lasting impact on the rights of disabled people remain to be seen, but these archives will provide a vital source of information long into the future.

Reflection from British Library staff Disability and Carer Support Network member Barbara O'Connor:

Stephen’s words echo mine and those of many who are struggling to understand what is happening to our rickety constructs, created by us so we can fit in and function. I saw lockdown-levelling-up, this pandemic by-product, as a boon. On 23 March 2020 my life became normalised: everyone was housebound, working remotely, socialising and culture-consuming on-line. Puff! Gone overnight the anxiety and exhaustion of the daily foray into hostile territory. In Stephen’s words, it was 'liberating.' Come-wheel-with-me, my able-bodied friends, I’ll show you how this works - I’ve got form! I felt guilty about these thoughts, worried that I would be seen as gleeful. I too was optimistic that we would emerge with a fresh vision of new ways of being, of delivering, of including. On 21 November 2022 my life remains, de facto, in lockdown. The gap between our worlds has not lessened, nor an interest in closing this gap increased. Many appear unaware or unwilling to recognise that their privilege to choose remains in intact whilst mine remains arbitrary. This is as crushing as anything done to my body by the virus. As Stephen, my benign doppelganger says, 'it feels like we are dispensable' and 'it is heart breaking.'

Find out more:

The interviews in the Voices of Our National Health Service collection are now available for listening on site at the British Library and a large number will be available online via British Library Sounds from 2023. You can search for the collection using reference number C1887 in the Sound and Moving Image Catalogue.

You can listen to more extracts from interviews in the Voices of Our National Health Service collection and explore material from the British Library’s other Covid-19 collections on the web resource Covid stories.

For more information on the wide range of disability oral history collections at the British Library, consult our oral histories of disability and personal and mental health collection guide.

This week’s post comes from Giulia Baldorilli, Sound and Vision Reference Specialist.

Above: Photo from train window taken by Giulia Baldorilli

Living in London, as I do, means commuting to work every day, and I find the quality of my daily commute really affects my mood and well-being.

It’s my belief that you need to entertain yourself when commuting. Taking the underground in London always fascinates me. The variety of faces and colours is what keeps my mind busy even during rush hour when the tube is packed.  People are a good source for stories and day-dreaming. I tend to imagine where the person in front of me might be from, what their plan is for that evening, or for the next year.

In the interview excerpt below from the National Life Stories project, the artist Ian Breakwell talks about why he prefers taking public transport. He discusses how it allows us do all the things we want to do, many of which are not possible with other forms of transport.

Listen to interview with Ian Breakwell

Download Ian Breakwell interview transcript

His last point about viewing landscape through a train window resonates with me in particular. As I and many in the UK return to working on-site most days of the week, the commute makes its gradual shift back into our daily routine. I like being a passenger. It is a chance to enjoy the landscape outside the window and lose myself in an unexpected inner conversation, or reverie.

This interview is available in full as part of a collection on the British Library Sounds website.