Public Hygiene and the Private Grotesque: Exploring the Toilet as a Site of Spatial and Sensory Inquiry in Auschwitz-Birkenau

• In Event: Spaces of Suffering

Abstract

Survivors and scholars have long demonstrated that Holocaust persecution imposed an
inversion of values and spaces; the meaning attributed to life was forcibly re-signified for death, while all spaces deemed private were subjected to the public sphere. What has yet to be analyzed within this subversion of spatial use are latrines and toilets in the camps. Denied access to the bathrooms, many prisoners, afflicted by Lagerdurchfall, or camp diarrhea, were forced to soil themselves while laboring. Moreover, the swift circulation of dysentery, E.coli, and other communicable diseases spread via fecal matter expedited toileting needs.

Meanwhile, the toilets and latrines themselves took on renewed uses. While still accessed for some toileting purposes, the bathroom staged covert exchanges of letters and underground documents, romantic gestures, explosives, and even reprieve from labor and experiments. Centrally, this inversion of space underscores a quandary: one the one hand, the SS sought to dehumanize camp prisoners, while on the other, they struggled to harness the communicable diseases that threatened public health—primarily to prevent transmission to camp guards and staff. What emerged was a distancing from toileting, on behalf of the SS, and therefore a timespace for prisoners to stage covert acts and interactions.

Exploring the shifting dynamic of this space, I draw on oral histories, testimonies, memoirs, and letters to reveal the new uses of the toilet, while also pointing to the fecal odors that accosted prisoners outside of these spaces. This scholarly intervention demonstrates the entanglements between spatial history and the history of senses and emotions within Holocaust
Studies. Building upon Nikolaus Wachsmann’s “Lived experience and the Holocaust: spaces, senses and emotions in Auschwitz,” such investigations personalize “nameless horror” (29),
bring the reader to the “reality of living and dying in Auschwitz” (29), and consequently “bring out elements of lived experienced in Auschwitz that have so far remained peripheral on the edges of historical visibility” (31).

Author

• Tiarra Maznick, UMass Amherst