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Book Review – Interpreting in Nazi Concentration Camps

Dublin Review of Books – Michael Cronin – Interpreting in Nazi Concentration Camps, by Michaela Wolf (ed), Bloomsbury, 192 pp, ISBN: 978-1501313257: “Many of the labour and extermination camps scattered across the Nazi Reich held up to thirty or forty different nationalities, most of them speaking different languages. For life and death to proceed as smoothly and as efficiently as possible, it was necessary that his master’s voice be clearly understood. Conversely, no resistance was possible without mutual intelligibility. Like the Nazis’ occupied territories the camps were inherently multinational and multilingual. There were three responses to the communicative challenge of terror. The first was to use or learn the language of the master. For Primo Levi, this was the primary means of survival in the bounded inferno of the death camps. In The Drowned and the Saved (1989) he recounts how knowing German in Auschwitz was a matter of life or death:

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