The piece 'Voices from the Abyss' premiered in autumn 2023 and portrays the struggle for survival, escape, and migration from the perspective of the surviving women of the concentration camp in Ravensbrück. The work has been further developed with three films created by students from the Visual Communication program at Malmö University.

Voices from the Abyss is the story of the struggle for survival, escape and migration from the survivors’ perspective. At the centre are testimonies, camp poetry, and stories from the women who managed to flee from the concentration camp in Ravensbrück and who, with the help of the white buses, found sanctuary in Malmö.

In the newly-written piece Voices from the Abyss for choir and cello, Staffan Storm has shaped these gripping texts and human fates into an exploratory musical journey.

The memory of the Holocaust is highlighted, which has been actively managed in the archive project Witnessing Genocide at Lund University, where the texts for the work are kept; an important story that links Malmö and Skåne to the history of the Second World War, its survivors, and the stories we share with future generations.

Voices from the Abyss premiered in the autumn of 2023 and the project has now been further developed with three films, each of which is based on parts of the work, and more specifically, a poem taken from the archive.

The films are produced for Holocaust Remembrance Day, 27 January.

 

Cajsa Lemark, student on Visual communication

This film portrays the longing for death when life is no longer a life. The womens peace is in this video portrayed in the smoke, in death and in longing towards the end

Cajsa Lemark, student on Visual communication

This film portrays the longing for death when life is no longer a life. The womens peace is in this video portrayed in the smoke, in death and in longing towards the end

The names scrolling through are from the arrival lists of the women who were rescued from Ravensbrück via the Red Cross rescue operation, and in this film they all the women who lived during the time when they saw death as their salvation.

Poem written by Zofia Iwanicka

Pictures from K.W. Gullers via Nordiska museet

   

Måns Rohde Wittsell, student on Visual Communication

This video About good and bad death is created with the purpose of raising the voices of the women held captive in Ravenbrück. The person only known as H.G wrote: “The hope of finally being free from the existence they were forced to live in, no matter what it meant” in their poem About good and ba...

Måns Rohde Wittsell, student on Visual Communication

This video About good and bad death is created with the purpose of raising the voices of the women held captive in Ravenbrück. The person only known as H.G wrote: “The hope of finally being free from the existence they were forced to live in, no matter what it meant” in their poem About good and bad death.

The piece expresses the longing for this liberation in the form of death, something that is visualized through sketches inspired by sketches and texts found in the women's notebooks that they kept throughout the time in Ravensbrück and the evacuation in 1945. The different scenes in the video are based on stories of the time and symbolism in the poem.

Poem written by H.G.

   

Ellen Ullman, student on Visual Communication

If you look back at any event, you rarely remember it in its entiery with all the details from beginning to end. You remember fragments, small seqences or snippets of an event.

Ellen Ullman, student on Visual Communication

If you look back at any event, you rarely remember it in its entiery with all the details from beginning to end. You remember fragments, small seqences or snippets of an event.

Music has an incredible ability to bring back memories, so the idea is to look at this film as memories brought back by music.

That is what I have tried to portray, with hand drawn animations and photographies that pictures scenes that took place during the time these women were held captive at Ravensbrück and their rescue in 1945. Brief moments that appear and just as quickly disappear again.

Poem written by Fela Cymerman.

Photo 1- Forced labor in the Ravensbrück. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Photo Archives. Holocaust encyclopedia. 

Photo 2: The rescue operation the white buses, Malmö Museer.