Michaela Wolf, ed. Interpreting in Nazi Concentration Camps. New York, Bloomsbury, 2016, 248 p.

The 2015 Hungarian film Son of Saul is an exceptionally powerful Holocaust drama with a stunning sensory impact. Attentive to voices rather than image, blurring the visuals and turning up the sound, László Nemes’ Oscar-winning movie introduces the spectator into a chaotic jumble of languages (Hungarian, German, Yiddish, Russian, Polish, French, Greek and Slovak are listed in the official description of the film) whose different intonations and accents echo and enhance the confusions of the camp experience. By focusing on language, Son of Saul recalls Claude Lanzmann’s landmark documentary Shoah (1985), remarkable for the way it foregrounded the specificity of language in all aspects of the Shoah through interviews with survivors and with the complicit populations of Polish townspeople. Lanzmann understood that images of the Holocaust had over time lost their power to shock, and that only individual narratives could restore some of the horrific affects of the experience. His long film (ten hours) patiently listened to individual accounts and included on screen the dialogue with interpreters. These layers of interpretation were one of the marks of Lanzmann’s originality. The interpreters became part of the action, serving as ‘‘first witnesses’’ to the terrible events recounted. Nemes’ and Lanzmann’s films are rare artefacts in the vast library of Holocaust literature—unusual in that they highlight language and linguistic diversity as a key element of the Holocaust experience. Like Michaela Wolf’s important collection, Interpreting in Nazi Concentration Camps, they lead us to question the overwhelming neglect of language in Holocaust studies. What might be the reason for this? David Gramling suggests in his chapter, “Translanguagers and the Concentrationary Universe” (pp. 43-60), that languages were “inevitably tabled as ‘luxury problems’ in the struggle to communicate ‘the informational truths of the Shoah internationally’” (p. 43). “Researching the Shoah multilingually entails shifting focus from memoirists” referential representations toward the translational means and procedures by which these are furnished and made possible (p. 53). Or it might be because, as Naomi Seidman has suggested in her splendid essay, “The Holocaust in Every Tongue” (from Faithful Renderings, 2006), that the fact that the Holocaust took place in languages other than English and that it is necessarily a translated experience, might allow for questioning of the authenticity of testimony. Translation calls attention to the fact that no experience is unmediated, even one as singular and cruel as the Holocaust. This insight is best expressed by Francine Kaufmann in the conclusion of her important essay in the volume “The Ambiguous Task of the Interpreter in Lanzmann’s Films Shoah and Sobibor: Between the Director and the Survivors of the Camps and Ghettos” (pp. 161-181): “Interpretation, with all its shortcomings (errors, omissions, hesitations, additions) is a metaphor for any testimony: one sees and hears, but one’s memory cannot reproduce faithfully all that was said: it always selects, interprets and misrepresents” (p. 176). Entering difficult terrain, Michaela Wolf’s collection is an important beginning to systematic study in this area. The specific area of language mediation, in particular in the context of the camps, has been very little explored in Holocaust studies, with the exception of work devoted to the translation of the Holocaust legacy (Seidman, 2006; Rosen, 2005). In Translation Studies, research on concentration camps belongs to a strand of investigation with an interest in situations of conflict, extreme violence and their aftermath. Such situations were broached in Wolf’s recent anthology Framing the Interpreter (with Anxo Fernández-Ocampo, 2014) an innovative collection that used photographic images as the basis for discussion of the material history of interpreting activities, as well as in a growing body of studies such as the histories …