Listening Between the Lines of Holocaust Testimonies from Thessaloniki, Greece

We are pleased to share the following reflections from Fortunoff Fellow Judith Lin:

As of April 2026, the last remaining Auschwitz survivor from Thessaloniki, Heinz Kounio z”l, has passed away at the age of 98. His passing makes the ongoing research related to video testimonies in Ladino all the more important. Working with the recordings at the Fortunoff Archive, I have found that there is a dialectic between my in-person memories with Holocaust survivors and the video recordings. Connections between the videos and the experiences in person poignantly illustrate the validity of Hank Greenspan’s concept of co-created knowledge: “listening with” or as I like to say, “feeling with.”

My purpose in working with Holocaust survivors in person was not primarily to establish facts or collect empirical data. I embraced my role as a listener who would hold the space so that survivors could go back in time in their minds and come back again to the present moment safely. The silences, the tender gaps, and more than anything, the emotions underlying the words of a testimony transmit meanings that could otherwise be lost. All of the conversations, the tears and the laughter, the good times and the bad still live in me. As I listen to the Fortunoff video testimonies today, I carry the memory of Holocaust survivors’ touch, their smiles, sense of humor, and most of all the musical sound of their endangered language, Ladino.

For over four years, I worked in person with a survivor, Moshe Ha Elion, who was born in Thessaloniki in 1912. He survived seven different concentration camps, including Auschwitz and Auschwitz-Birkenau. In 2016, he asked me to translate one of his epic poems into English, and we came to a passage of the poem that discusses the smell of the crematoria. Moshe insisted that he wanted to translate the word of his original poem as “steak.” The Ladino and my published translation reads as follows:*

La povre no savia, lo ambezo mas tadre,
Ke dizde el primo dia kedo sino padre i madre.
I entindio estonses de ke se espandia
Un guezmo de asado de noche i dia.

And after, she knew the reason
why was the smell of roasting,
It was the smell of burnt flesh
by day and night was spreading

I had worked out multiple translation options into iambic heptameter, and in my opinion, the best version for “guezmo de asado” was “burnt flesh” or “roasting flesh.” However, Moshe was adamant that I needed to include the word, “steak” in my translation. At the time, now over ten years ago, I was disgusted by the word “steak,” and the more I tried to explain how inappropriate it would be to put that word in the translation, the angrier Moshe became. I told him that a steak is delicious, and an audience will be repulsed by the comparison of food to human beings. We ended up in a shouting match in his tiny office. The argument continued over lunch when Moshe suddenly shoved a piece of beef in my face with his fork, shouting, “roasting steak, roasting steak!” I almost threw up and immediately ran out of his home. When I returned to work the following day, my version “roasting flesh” remained on the Microsoft Word document, and we never spoke of the incident again. As the years went by, especially after Moshe passed away in November 2022, I contemplated if I had made the right translation choice. Was it wrong for me to allow my sensibilities to interfere with the representation of his lived experience?

Flash forward to one day recently. I was listening to a testimony by Joseph Gatenio housed in the Fortunoff Archive. Joseph was born in Thessaloniki, Greece in 1929 and deported to Auschwitz just like Moshe. His testimony elaborates upon a traumatic memory of the smell of the crematoria, and he uses the same wording in the description of the smell of the crematoria:

Ai echavan los kadavres i las flamas se vian i el fumo ke salía. Estava todo el kampo entero komo un bruyar, uno keria a kaminar i el guezmo de karne asada. No lo puedo sentir mas este guezmo. Kuando syento esto me akodro. I lo ke tengo dainda, ke no puedo dormir munchas noches. Es el guezmo del kampo, el guezmo de la muerte, el guezmo ke teniya la djente en si de la poka komida, de la suzeydad. El guezmo es una koza ke no se puede ulvidar.”

There they threw the bodies and you could see the flames coming up from there. The whole camp was foggy. You didn’t want to walk around because it smelled like carne asada. I can’t handle that smell anymore. When I smell it, I remember, and still many nights I can’t sleep. The smell of the camp, the smell of death, the smell that was on the starving people, and the filthiness. The smell is something that I cannot forget (22.41).

The Aviary catalogue for Joseph Gatenio’s testimony currently features a partial translation completed many years ago by a Yale administrator. The passage in English reads “the whole camp smelled of charred meat.” I am not surprised that the administrator chose to avoid the words, “steak” or “grilled meat.” These terms in English are associated with restaurant menus, cooking recipes, and eating. The effect of including words with such positive connotations would be repulsive both to a reader and a translator, just like the situation that happened between Moshe and me. But what happens when there is a conflict between the emotional reaction of an audience and the Holocaust survivor? Moshe and Joseph both use the term “asado” which means “grilled.” My instinct to translate the term “flesh” and the Yale administrator’s choice to write “charred meat” distance the English version from the repugnancy reflected in the original Ladino. It is understandable to want to soften the translation of “karne asada,” but what is lost by this choice?

Examining Moshe and Joseph’s accounts together has made me realize that a soft translation fails to acknowledge why was the smell of “asado” is so important in the narrative. Its significance lies in the pivotal moment when the smelling marked a point of no return—a moment of loss of innocence—that haunted both men. During his testimony, Joseph continually returns to the topic of this realization. He elaborates further on in the recording, and later he discusses his nightmares as well:

Kerya avlar un poko de la psikolozya ke tenyamos el tyempo ke estuvimos adyentro de los kampos de konsentrasyon. Aviyamos arivado a un momento a dezir ke los ke tenían, los ke tuvyeron shans, eran los ke se fueron de la prima ora i se muryeron sin entender deke se muryeron.

I wanted to speak a little bit about the psychology that we had during the time we were in the concentration camps. We had gotten to the point of saying that the people who were lucky were those who died right away without understanding how they were dying.

The theme of traumatic realization is frequent during Joseph’s entire testimony. In the same way, Moshe’s poem pivots on the line “lo amebzo mas tadre”—I have to admit, translating that line “and after, she knew the reason” may have been faithful to the sonnet rhyme scheme, but it is not faithful to the meaning of “ambezar,” which means “to learn.”

Holding these two narratives together, listening to Moshe and Joseph, reveals deeper meanings about both of their experiences in Birkenau. For me, the dialectic between their two narratives represents a warning for me both as a translator and an educator. The Holocaust is not appropriate—what happened is repulsive, and it is good that I feel that aversion. Softening the translations revealed my own naivety. If I could go back, I would respond differently to Moshe in his office that day. Regardless of the challenges of the sonnet form, I would not respond in anger and disgust towards the word “steak.” Instead, I would accept his experience, recognizing a loss of innocence and traumatic memory housed in that smell. Unfortunately, I cannot change the events of that day, but these experiences do change how I approach testimonies now. In my translation of Joseph’s words, I choose to retain the term “carne asada” – something most people have seen on many a Hispanic menu. If the reader is disgusted, it is only because the situation demands aversion. My future translations will not hide that.

*I discuss this situation with Moshe and the publication of his translated poem in a memoir piece entitled “Song in my Heart,” published by Sephardic Horizons. https://www.sephardichorizons.org/Volume11/Issue4/Lin.html