Published Paper Details:

The Nazis constructed Auschwitz by the end of 1943. Originally designed as an extermination camp, the leadership's decision to utilise all human resources available, including Jews, transformed it into a labour camp. The camps classified the detainees encompassed all ages, conditions, origins, languages, cultures, and traditions. Deported from various European countries, these detainees spoke up to forty different languages, creating an extraordinarily polyglot society. However, the official language, or a wide range of sociolinguistic terms, was German. The detainees struggled with the German language as all the signs were in German, which they didn't know or understand. This presented numerous challenges for them. They were required to complete everything in German exclusively. When they tried to communicate in their native language, they faced physical abuse and humiliation. The SS guards often used interpreters to translate their orders to detainees. These interpreters played an important part in the concentration camps' linguistic confusion. This paper seeks to highlight the circumstances of interpreters in a multilingual concentration camp, emphasizing the similarity of their fate to that of other detainees through an account from Primo Levi's masterpiece literary work If This is a Man.