What languages were spoken in the ghettoes and camps, in what David Rousset referred to in 1946 as the “concentrationary universe” [L’Univers concentrationnaire] ? In the camps in the west you are more likely to have heard French, German, Dutch, and sometimes Spanish or Italian among the inmates. In the east, where the vast majority of killing camps were located, one heard local languages mix with languages from all over Europe: Hungarian, Romanian, German, Polish, Ukrainian, Russian, Lithuanian, Latvian and, of course, Yiddish. In fact Yiddish was the first or near first language of the largest group of Jewish victims, and, therefore, the largest single language community of all.

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