Captured and deported to a foreign land. And in that land, in addition to the cold and fear, those who were deported had to contend with something definitely not secondary: the language. A harsh and decidedly non-intuitive unknown language. But what weight did it have in daily life inside the camp? What were deportees called and what language was spoken? And did the language then play a role in historical research? To try to understand how people communicated in the camps and to answer these questions, we spoke with Donatella Chiapponi, historian and author of a research and publication on the subject. What language was spoken in the Nazi concentration camps?

CHIAPPONI ANSWER: In the National Socialist concentration camps, the prisoners came first and foremost from countries all over Europe, so there was a clear predominance of eastern populations, Poles, Yugoslavs, Russians, but in reality it was a multi-ethnic and polyglot community. So also French, Spanish, Italian and often therefore we had to imagine ourselves, to immerse ourselves in a world in which it often happened that the prisoner lived in blocks, in barracks, with comrades from different backgrounds. So even sometimes exclusively foreigners, so that one could find oneself without even a comrade who spoke one’s language. The language of the inmates is known in Italian in the sector, let’s say as lageresperanto in Germany, instead it was known as lagerjargon or lagersprache and there was also then the let’s say Polish influence, so that was also known. Obviously after the domination it was not. In the 1950s they used the term lagersprache, so with this ending in a which is not German, but is Polish. Here we were saying that the language of the prisoners was in any case an essential, reduced language and above all this was because the prisoner was not able to express himself well and then because talking to his comrades was forbidden by the SS. So let’s say that the language was necessarily a meagre language, reduced to the bare bones. And we also have to think that the prisoner, especially after a while, had less and less energy. So partly because of the hard work, partly because of the lack of nutrition, so let’s imagine people at the end of their tether in a completely different context to what life can be like today, in our day and age. So little energy, little possibility of communication. Here we have that in a completely reversed context compared to today’s standards, it is a schizophrenic language. A language made up of few words. This is let’s say the point of view of a prisoners’ language. If we then move on to the language of the rulers, of those who are often referred to as the torturers when reading testimonies, it is a crude language, a harsh language, a violent, offensive language, used by both the SS and the overseers. And that reflected well let’s say the reality of Nazi-fascism, of dictatorship. The leaders in particular, the SS chiefs were aware, and were educated to this, that shouting the insult, accompanied then of course by certain violent, physical, therefore beatings and punishments, could strongly influence the mood and the disheartenment of the prisoners. It was a real strategy of terror and also of deception. And it was also through language. The SS often used mystifying terms, they used euphemisms to hide the reality, to obviously maintain order as much as possible and thus control over the deportees. Just to give a few examples away, the crematoria were called Bäckerei, i.e. bakery, chimney, kamin. The showers were the dusches, which actually hid in most cases, not always, the gas chambers…. and the inmates, to give another example, who were forced to work in the crematoriums, were called the sonderkommando, so a special team. The purpose was precisely to deceive the masses and thus prevent their panic and possible acts of rebellion. That was the main purpose. Then the attitude of the SS and barrack leaders, was essentially one of contempt, of disdain, so that for them the inmates were the untermenschen, that is, the under men. And this term untermenschen, is in so many testimonies. Not only German, also Italian, French, Spanish… it is often mentioned. It has remained in the collective memory of the former deportees. They were stuck, that is to say, pieces, another very much used term. No longer human beings but numbers

QUESTION BERTOLUCCI: What did it have as a language?

CHIAPPONI ANSWER: From a syntactic point of view, it was really a very very reduced language, made up of just a few words, short concise sentences. And also due to the fact that they were often foreigners among them and so obviously it became difficult to communicate, key words were created. Words that were widely known by the inmates of all camps, words that seemed almost more like messages in the urgent life of the lager.

QUESTION BERTOLUCCI: Like what?

CHIAPPONI’S ANSWER: For example, the term from the point of view of the prisoner who was listening to the SS, the term appelplatz, that is to say the roll call square, the moment of roll call, was known and it was the moment when they were decimated, when those who were still able to work were chosen and those who were too weak were eliminated. So if one could, one organised oneself in such a way as to arrive at the roll call square in the best possible condition. Considering that then the alarm clock was in the middle of the night and every morning this roll call was made. But in the roll-call square they were also called out suddenly during the day and at that point the selection was made. That’s just an example, eh, for goodness sake, but at the appelplatz one organised oneself in such a way as to get there as fit as possible, as it were. So that one could still be considered fit for work. Because obviously the prisoner was essentially exploited for work as long as he could. Then he was sent to what was the, in inverted commas, infirmary which was then the anteroom of death, of final selection, of selection for the gas chambers. Organisieren was another typical verb used and known a little by everyone, which meant managing to get food somehow. Lucky were the prisoners who worked in the kitchens for example. Lucky in inverted commas. Because they were able to organisieren precisely from the German, something to take to the barracks. Then a form of solidarity and sharing could also arise, no, also on the basis of the testimonies I have heard and read, there are not a few cases in which a solidarity and internal resistance was formed by the prisoners against the barrack leaders and the SS itself. I don’t know, for example, it was used, not only in the kitchens, but also in the rooms where the goods were taken from the inmates who arrived and were then, all these goods were reorganised and divided up, always under the control, obviously, of the service chiefs, let’s say, but often the inmates in these situations, in these realities, managed to steal something and then in a sort of black market, obviously clandestine in the barracks, exchanged what they managed to get for something else which could be, obviously, in the best case, food. The Italians were called Macaroni, Badoglio just for the sake of it, by the Polish Italians, that is to say, Italians in a Polish derivation, because I may not have mentioned this before, but next to German a dominant language was Polish. This was because, because most of the concentration camps were in the eastern part of Germany on the border with Poland, so a large number of Jewish inmates were Polish, but also because a large part of the barrack leaders were of Polish origin. So the dominant language alongside German was Polish.

QUESTION BERTOLUCCI: So basically the deportees spoke a mixture of German and Polish among themselves. So there was a camp language with which they communicated?

CHIAPPONI’S ANSWER: Yes, yes, that was precisely what I was studying, studying it afterwards, after liberation and also I must say several years later, because the study of the language of the camp did not start until the 1960s, it started in Poland with a few essays, two or three essays by scholars. But this was called the lagerjargon, the Esperanto lager, and the predominant words among the inmates were certainly of Polish and German origin. But they also used words from Spain and France, Italy and also from the area, even if lesser, let’s say the Dutch area, let’s say the English Channel, that part of Europe. Of the northern part.

QUESTION BERTOLUCCI: How heavy was it in everyday life, for survival I mean, to be able to understand the language?

CHIAPPONI ANSWER: Surely it could have been salvific. Because I remember in particular, I had the good fortune to meet Lilana Millul and to be able to interview some former deportees as well as her, a former deportee from Trieste called Marta Ascoli, and then in Germany, I was able to interview a former deportee Annie Lundholm and they all told me episodes that were then printed in their memories in which they remembered that sometimes single words, said between comrades, could be salvific. That is, they could save you. If you understood what certain key words meant, such as the moment of roll call, you could organise yourself, you could, of course, even manage to move in such a way as to avoid certain situations that were fatal for many. So knowing the language was crucial, and I have to say that I have read many accounts in which the language was given great importance even though the possibility of communication was rare, very rare. But as a moment of sharing with others, language helped not to isolate oneself completely. Being able to speak with a companion, being able to express oneself, even if only in a few words, if they were foreigners could also help to keep the mood as high as possible in such an extreme situation, language had a very strong importance. Although I have to say that this dimension has been little studied, because when, for example, I approached this subject, I realised that very little had been published in Italy and the little that had been published, which was actually very, very rich in notions, had been published in Poland and Germany. The literature, however, on this subject was really rare, so there was little study of the linguistic aspect within the lager, at least in the 1960s and 1970s, then gradually it was a little more developed, but I always saw it as a subject, perhaps I dare say secondary.

QUESTION BERTOLUCCI: Is there a reason or because there were so many topics to cover?

CHIAPPONI’S ANSWER: I don’t know, in my little experience, I could say that both the argument that there were so many other things to try to remember and so the language perhaps came out a little less. Both because the ex-prisoners, when they decided to recount, would then dwell on other aspects, for example the repetitiveness of the day inside the camp, the moments of the roll call, the moments of the march to, if it was work camps, to the factories outside the camps and then those who managed to recount the more tragic parts. But it must be said that memory
was very very difficult as we know. So those who started to talk about it, talked about it in most cases many years later, and at that point I think that the memory was fixed more than anything else episodes, moments, and those who managed to talk about it, however, kind of left out the linguistic aspect. I myself, when I had the opportunity and the chance, the good fortune to get to know some former deportees, to get to the subject of language, I mean we really had to get there. Here I had to ask them specifically, it was not in their memory. Then objectively starting to talk, then this aspect came up, which, I repeat, was by no means secondary. Both as a socialisation value, as far as possible, and as a system of violence and terror imparted by the SS, by the barrack leaders.

QUESTION BERTOLUCCI: How much did language also play a role in the difficulties of researching who had been deported? I imagine that even people may have, so to speak, disappeared off the radar because their names were perhaps transcribed wrongly.

CHIAPPONI ANSWER: Definitely, definitely. This happened and then it must be said that the registrations took place with some sort of cards, let’s say entry cards, identity cards, where names, surnames were registered, those who registered were mostly German or Polish, so we can imagine how surnames were mispronounced and then often automatically a number was given. The number was given in all the camps, in some as we know like Auschwitz, it was even branded on the skin. At that point, the inmate was no longer first and last name, but was really a number. And in the lists one found these endless rows of numbers to which often corresponded, but it was not even said, surnames, in most cases then transcribed incorrectly, so that the traces of many deportees were lost. That of the matriculation number, by the way, was a reason for further violence, beatings and so on, because this number was given, often with five digits, because then inside the camp we were talking about thousands of people, so the number 1780 was given this number in German, absolutely in German, to be learnt by heart immediately in German. … I don’t know if you know the language, but in short, a language, let’s say with a hard pronunciation, no, strong, numbers in German are very difficult and so I can imagine how hard it was for a foreigner to learn his number by heart. When was it needed? It was needed in the famous roll-call square in the morning when the such-and-such number was recited so the prisoner had to recognise it by sound and the prisoner had to step forward and introduce himself. So number such and such had to, when he heard his number called, step forward and then present himself at roll call. If this was not done, so if the person hearing their number did not recognise it, did not know that it was actually their number and did not step forward, they were… that is, it was a reason for beatings and torture. So from the very first moment you step through the gates, language is important.