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Freedom from Fear: Hearing Liberation Through the Echoes of History
Professor Sara Ann Sewell explores the sounds, sensations, and emotional realities of Holocaust liberation
University News | April 16, 2026
In a moving and deeply reflective lecture hosted by the Robert Nusbaum Center, attendees gathered in Blocker Auditorium on April 16, to consider a powerful question: what did freedom sound like at the end of one of history’s darkest chapters?
Presented by Sara Ann Sewell, Ph.D., professor of modern European cultural and gender history at èßäÊÓƵ University, “Freedom from Fear: Jews and the Sounds of Liberation, 1944–1945,” invited listeners to rethink liberation not simply as a moment of triumph, but as a layered, deeply human experience shaped by trauma, memory, and the senses.
Drawing on survivor accounts from the final years of World War II, Sewell examined the liberation of Jewish prisoners from Nazi concentration camps, including sites such as Buchenwald. For many, she explained, the arrival of Allied forces in 1944 and 1945 marked the end of relentless fear—a fear that had defined daily existence under Nazi persecution. In those first moments, liberation was often experienced as an overwhelming release, a sudden and unfamiliar quieting of terror.
Yet, as Sewell emphasized, that initial sense of relief was fleeting. Joy quickly gave way to grief as survivors began to comprehend the magnitude of their losses—families gone, communities erased, and entire ways of life destroyed. Liberation, then, was not a singular emotional peak, but a complicated passage between survival and mourning.
Central to Sewell’s talk was the concept of “sensory history,” particularly the role of sound in shaping human experience. Rather than focusing solely on visual or textual records, she explored how survivors heard liberation: the absence of gunfire, the unfamiliar presence of silence, the murmur of unfamiliar voices, and even the dissonance between expectation and reality. These auditory shifts, she argued, played a critical role in how individuals processed their newfound freedom.
By approaching Holocaust history through this sensory lens, Sewell challenged attendees to consider how memory is formed not only through what is seen, but through what is felt and heard. Her work underscores that liberation was not simply a historical endpoint, but an ongoing emotional reckoning.
Sewell’s current research continues to explore these themes, focusing on the audial and emotional lives of Holocaust victims. Her forthcoming book, “Sounding, Hearing, Silencing: Experiencing the Holocaust through the Sonic,” promises to further illuminate the ways sound and silence shaped one of the most profound human experiences of the twentieth century.
Through this lecture, the Robert Nusbaum Center once again provided a space for thoughtful engagement with complex histories—encouraging attendees to listen more closely, not only to the past, but to the ways it continues to resonate today.