GUSEN CONVOLUTE – Artistic Reflections by Peter Androsch on Music Created by Prisoners in Camp Gusen

April 28th, 2025

Peter Androsch, an Austrian composer, musician and sound artist, has spent the last years studying and reflecting music created by prisoners of the former KL Gusen I concentration camp during their imprisonment between 1940 and 1945 with a creative team of experts.

The first of up to twenty reflections of this GUSEN CONVOLUTE are now accessible in German, English and Polish at the website https://www.gusen-convolute.org/english/

Most of the music and lyrics were created in this death camp by gifted intellectual prisoners from Poland.

They risked their lives in KL Gusen in order to save a spark of human culture through this cultural activity in a camp whose task was to mercilessly dehumanize and exterminate members of the Polish intelligentsia since 1940.

Unfortunately, not all of these prisoner artists survived the hell of Gusen. This makes the current project also a memorial to victims who tried to remain human through music and poetry in one of the most inhumane Nazi extermination camps.

Many of the pieces were provided by the Aleksander Kulisiewicz Collection at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.

The original sheet music for reflected music pieces can be downloaded from the new website https://www.gusen-convolute.org/english/.

This first reflections are now being made publicly available on the occasion of the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the former St. Georgen-Gusen-Mauthausen complex of concentration camps on May 5, 1945.

The number of reflections will be gradually increased in the coming weeks and months.

Peter Androsch was supported in this project for five years by Prof. Rudolf Haunschmied with his expertise on the former Gusen complex of concentration camps. The Gusen Memorial Committee (GMC) also helped in financing this project over the years.

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