Lydia Vlasidou – York University in Toronto..
Lida Maria Dodou – University of Vienna
The Ladino-language testimonies are a small and understudied subset of Holocaust survivor narratives. Unlike testimonies recorded in other languages, these interviews were often conducted in a language was no longer the survivor’s primary language of everyday expression. This linguistic displacement shaped the structure, content and meaning of the narratives.
This paper examines the methodological, linguistic and historical implications of Ladino Holocaust testimonies focusing on liberation as a moment of rupture that structured survivors’ narratives into a clear “before” and “after.” Before, everyday life unfolded primarily in Ladino and Greek; after, survivors’ postwar trajectories were articulated mostly in Greek creating a linguistic disjuncture between lived experience and later testimony. Survivors often display a striking contrast between their fluent recollection of prewar life in Ladino and their difficulty narrating wartime and especially post-liberation experiences in that same language. The resulting lexical gaps, code-switching and narrative dislocations are not mere linguistic irregularities, but rather reveal the complex entanglement of language, memory and trauma.
While Ladino testimonies possess immense linguistic value as records of a severely endangered language (some even argue an already disappeared language), their historical value requires critical methodological engagement. We argue that researchers shouldn’t treat them as flawed or even exotic historical sources or merely as linguistic artifacts, but must approach them with attention to their linguistic and performative dimensions, so that they can offer unique insight into the relationship between language, lived experience and trauma memory.
This paper contributes to broader discussions on multilingual Holocaust memory and the epistemological challenges of working with survivor narratives across linguistic registries in so-called minor languages. It examines the testimonies’ language not solely as a means of communication but as a conscious choice reflecting cultural affinities as well as a lens to how survivors construct their memory.
Lydia Vlasidou is a first-year PhD student in History at York University in Toronto. She holds an MA in Arab and Hebrew Cultures from the University of Granada and specializes in Sephardic Jewish history and the Judeo-Spanish (Ladino) language.
Lida Maria Dodou is a historian who specializes in Salonika Jews during the 19th and 20th centuries. Her dissertation examined the Habsburg influence on Salonika and its Jewish community, particularly its impact on migration patterns. She is currently a lecturer at the University of Vienna, and she is also a Research Fellow at the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies of Yale University