Experiment, Trickhouse vol. 10
Quintan Ana Wikswo
SONDERBAUTEN: the special block
The Sonderbauten Project began a year ago, when a graceful, dignified ninety-two year old woman offered me a cup of tea.
A survivor of the Holocaust, she told her family's story, but she never told her own. She had been a forced prostitute in a Nazi brothel, and to her, silence allowed women to rebuild their lives, afterwards, without ostracization. Although brutalized by sexual atrocity and the weapon of rape, these bodies literally kept Judaism alive after genocide. Many a child born to a survivor, she said, was born from the silenced stories of women such as herself.
She didn't want to tell her story, she wanted her story told.
Because of her, I went to Germany and other former Nazi territories to look for the Sonderbauten - the Nazi-run brothels - and pay my respects to the experience and memory of the women who had been enslaved. I found the women and the Sonderbauten were still hidden, still silenced, still a source and cause for shame and censure.
At Dachau, I found an American aerial surveillance photo from 1942 that showed the location of the Sonderbauten brothel: since torn down, unmarked, and unmentioned on the tour map. A patch of anonymous grey stones disguised the ruins of its foundation, and no other visitors knew to linger there.
I sat in the isolated patch of stone and grass where these women once lived. I looked and listened and wrote, and worked through the rain with a series of broken German cameras that had survived the Dresden fire bombing.
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TEXT, IMAGES, VIDEO & FIELD RECORDINGS
Quintan Ana Wikswo
DESIGN & FLASH CODING:
Noah Saterstrom
VOICE:
Anna Lisa Blöth
MUSIC
Isaac Schankler
VIOLIN:
Andrew Tholl
TRANSLATION INTO GERMAN:
Dorothea Herreiner
SOUND EDITING
John Would
VIDEO EDITING
Eric Grush
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