Yiddish Language During the Holocaust

In the YIVO archives sits a dictionary of over 3,000 words that did not exist before the Holocaust. Nachman Blumenthal began compiling it in 1944, right after liberation, when he returned to Lublin and heard Yiddish he no longer understood. He was not alone. Across postwar Europe, survivors were recording the new language that had emerged in ghettos, camps, and hiding—a linguistic phenomenon that Hannah Pollin-Galay calls khurban Yiddish (Holocaust Yiddish). Her book Occupied Words: What the Holocaust Did to Yiddish investigates both the words themselves and the urgent, widespread impulse to document them.

The Mystery That Started the Book

Pollin-Galay came to the topic through confusion. While researching Holocaust testimonies recorded in the 1990s, she kept hearing Yiddish words that were not in any dictionary. Native Yiddish-speaking mentors could not explain them either. The survivors themselves seemed to signal these words were special—leaning into the camera with a wink or emphasis. One example was malek from the Kovno ghetto, which did not mean "angel" as usual but rather an underage kid paid to do the work of a privileged adult. A colleague then handed her Blumenthal's dictionary, and she realized these encounters were just the tip of an iceberg: multiple postwar lexicographers had independently set out to record how Yiddish had transformed under Nazi occupa