When Jewish prisoners were interned during the Holocaust, the Yiddish language went through a metamorphosis — changing and expanding to include new words about their brutal everyday existence. What emerged and lives on today are words that represent both cultural history and a testimony of survivor resilience.

That “destruction Yiddish” is the subject of scholar Hannah Pollin-Galay’s latest book “Occupied Words: What the Holocaust Did to Yiddish.”

Pollin-Galay, who’s a senior lecturer of Yiddish and Holocaust studies in the department of literature at Tel Aviv University, said changes in language are quite common. But when there are catastrophic events like the Holocaust, the rate in which language changes is expedited because existing words cannot convey what’s happening in real time.

“How can you describe a guard who is standing and selecting who’s going to live and who is going to die when you’ve never been in that situation before? You don’t have the word for it. So you need a new word,” she told GBH’s Under the Radar host Callie Crossley.

The language also changed to reflect physical changes.

“Starving people speak differently,” Pollin-Galay said. “They have different ways of listening.”

And the close contact of different languages and different cultures in ghettos and concentration camps also led to the rapid change.

“There were over 40 different languages spoken in Auschwitz, for example,” Pollin-Galay said. “All of these factors together produced ... perhaps around 3,000 new words and phrases in the Yiddish language that reflect these events and circumstances. And when we go into those words, we can get new pictures of what daily life was like for Jews in these circumstances of imprisonment and erasure and torment during the Holocaust.”

Pollin-Galay said most of the phrases and words of what’s now known as Khurbn Yiddish – “Yiddish of the Holocaust” – are not a part of the Yiddish that’s spoken today, not only because the majority of speakers died during the Holocaust but because the words themselves can be vulgar, humiliating and remind “Jews of their moment of deep victimization and humiliation.”

“So the words were incredibly important to the Yiddish speakers in the Holocaust,” she said. “This is incredibly important to them as a testament to the complexity and the paradoxes that they lived through. But that doesn’t mean the people after the war wanted to preserve or hear these words. They were really kind of edited out of the Yiddish language in a lot of contexts.”

Still, Pollin-Galay said this “destruction Yiddish” is an important and novel way to study, document and remember the horrors of the Holocaust.

“There’s a lot about daily life that we don’t know, we don’t understand,” she said. “And these words are a really, really intimate window into that experience. And that, in and of itself, is really worthwhile for everyone to know about.”

GUEST

  • Hannah Pollin-Galay , author and senior lecturer (associate professor) in the department of literature at Tel Aviv University, head of the Jona Goldrich Institute for Yiddish Language, Literature and Culture, a 2024-2025 senior scholar at the Fortunoff Archive for Holocaust Testimony at Yale University and a Yiddish Book Center Translation Fellow. “Occupied Words: What the Holocaust Did to Yiddish” is her second book.