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What
does the word "mud" connote? To most people it
simply means a soft, wet deposit left on the ground after
rain. To Auschwitz survivors, however, "mud" has a
far deeper significance.
The camp inmate's day involved moving rapidly from living
quarters to the toilets to the soup line; it involved long
treks from the camp to the work areas; it entailed hours of
standing in order, motionless. The people were weak, and the
mud on the ground made walking and standing difficult. Corpses
lay uncovered in the mud. The mud was an enemy.
Primo Levi noted that to survive the camp, one had to be
either prominent or transparent. The kapo were prominent, and
for the masses to survive they were compelled to hunch over
and humbly look to the ground - always facing the mud. Thus,
when an Auschwitz survivor refers to "mud" in a
testimony, it is far more than a climatic or topographical
description.
Dr. Itzchak Attia is researching, in the framework of the
International Institute for Holocaust Research, the semantics
involving the deeper meaning of the nouns used in testimonies.
Attia explains that when a survivor describes his or her
Auschwitz experience, there is a lack of suitable language
available that can sensitively and accurately describe the
situation without making it banal, and thus changing the
event. Elie Wiesel commented that Auschwitz is
incomprehensible to someone who was not there. If words are
supposed to transmit ideas, but they in fact misrepresent
them, then the truth is deformed. Thus, in an effort to give
deeper meaning to the terms used in testimonies, and
consequently to draw a more comprehensive picture of camp
life, Attia has compiled a list of 50 words used repetitively
in testimonies, which he intends to explain based on their
context.
"Words are signals," explains Attia. "Simple
nouns such as "soup", "walk",
"food", "door" are much deeper than just
the letters. Each word encompasses a whole world of
connotations." So what is in a word? Attia, a historian
and linguistics expert, explains that words have both
structural and cognitive semantics. He is most concerned with
the structural semantics, that is, the semantic (or the
explicit) traits of a noun. "In order to talk about a
noun in a particular time period, one has to understand the
semantic traits attached to that noun, at that time." His
work, therefore, amounts to a dictionary of Auschwitz
survivors' terminology.
One word that has especially interested Attia is
"door", more accurately, the door to the train
transporting Jews into the camp. When a survivor refers to the
opening of the [transport] "door", he or she is
recalling a bombardment of sensations: the immense noise of
the simultaneous opening of all the train doors; the sudden
transferal from pitch black to glaring light; the contrast
between the intense heat suffered for anything between three
and ten days in the stuffy carriage to the ice-cold chill of
the raw elements; and the change from an intensely
claustrophobic environment to a vast open expanse.
Attia calls the "door" the "missing air
chamber", because it should be the space where those
being transported can prepare or readjust to the stark
difference between life on either side of it. Instead of
alighting through this door, the inmates are dragged from the
carriage and marched into a horrific new reality, a different
world. And the more their reality is contrasted to ours, the
harder it is for us to understand the depth of language they
use in recalling the event.
Attia says that those who read the testimonies, but were not
interned, need to be initiated into the language used by the
survivors. "We have to understand the specific semantic
traits, but the survivors, largely for psychological reasons,
are not explaining them".
"Soup" is another word that Attia has attempted to
reduce to semantic traits. Soup was more than nutrition (it
was barely that) and very temporary warmth. It was an
instrument of reward and punishment - the authority's control
over who received the soup with stock rather than just the
tasteless hot water. (And if one managed to obtain stock, it
could be bartered for essential items.) Also, the inmate's
fight for a place in the soup line was part of the feeding
process. The soup was a source of life.
The term "arrival" (at the camp) also has specific
connotations to the Auschwitz inmate. With arrival, came
assault by the SS, terrifying dogs, selection, and
registration. The language of the Auschwitz survivor is
clearly burdened with deep semantic traits. For the reader to
fully comprehend the memory being recalled, these traits must
be acknowledged. Otherwise, the reading is trivialized.
With the completion of his work, Attia's lexicon will offer a
greater understanding of the semantic traits of the language
used by Auschwitz survivors in their testimonies.
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