What Did People Talk About in the Warsaw Ghetto? Yiddish Words of the Holocaust

The Holocaust radically altered the way its victims spoke and communicated—especially for Yiddish speakers. Finding prewar language incapable of describing the imprisonment, death, and dehumanization of the Shoah, prisoners added or reinvented thousands of Yiddish words and phrases to describe their new reality. These crass, witty, and sometimes beautiful Yiddish words – Khurbn Yiddish, or “Yiddish of the Holocaust” – puzzled and intrigued the East European Jews who were experiencing the metamorphosis of their own tongue in real time. This lecture from Hannah Pollin-Galay, Pen Tishkach Chair of Holocaust Studies at the University of Massachusetts, will focus on the experience of language in the Warsaw ghetto, looking at the new Yiddish words invented, how people debated their meanings and why they felt it was so important to remember them.