Sounds of Defiance: The Holocaust, Multilingualism and the Problem of English

Abstract

Instead, he focuses on the "untainted" quality of English which made it, in some cases, a virtual tool for survival-in a few stories, knowledge of English language actually saved the lives of endangered Jews-and in others, a less adequate mode for the translation of an experience that was perpetrated through German, received in Yiddish or Polish or any of a number of European languages, and which developed its own jargon in the camps, through a mishmash of German and numerous other tongues spoken by perpetrators and victims.