Fani Oflidou
University of Patras
This presentation examines the linguistic features and narrative dimensions of the testimonies of two female survivors of Auschwitz–Birkenau, Sephardic Jews originating from Thessaloniki, Greece. The testimonies were delivered in Ladino (Judeo-Spanish) and form part of the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies. The corpus of Judeo-Spanish testimonies included in the Archive was translated by the Judeo-Spanish Language Learning Laboratory of the Department of History and Archaeology at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, under the supervision of Mr. J. Benmayor.
The two interviewees were only twelve and fifteen years old when they were deported by train to nazi-occupied Poland, where they lost their entire families. One of them was also subjected to the gynecological experiments carried out in Block 10.
The testimonies present significant scholarly interest both for the detailed representation of lived experiences of terror and for the similarities and divergences between them, given that one of the interviewees endured extreme gender-based violence, having been subjected to experiments in block 10, and the other experienced sexual abuse perpetrated by the same Russian soldiers she regarded as her liberators. These similarities and differences emerge at linguistic, thematic, and interpretive levels in both languages they use (greek and ladino). Particular emphasis is placed on the role of the male interviewer in shaping the narrative process and facilitating the emergence of personal memory and testimony as well as in the women´s careful selection of words — whether consideredappropriate, linguistic taboos or traumatic — that were employed to convey intensely personal narratives to a male interlocutor.
The case under examination constitutes a paradigmatic example of documenting Holocaust trauma from a gendered perspective through the use of a language that has largely fallen into disuse within the broader Sephardic community worldwide.
Fani Oflidou is a PhD candidate at the University of Patras under the supervision of E. Lemonidou. She began studying the Judeo-Spanish language (Ladino), as well as the Rashi and Solitreo scripts, at the Laboratory of Jewish Studies of the Department of History and Archaeology, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, under the supervision of J. Benmayor and I. Abram.