Jewish Survivors of the German Language in Montreal

This book documents the life paths of some of the last German-speaking survivors of the Holocaust who settled in Montreal, Canada. It focuses on the relationship of the Jewish survivors to the German mother tongue as a theme where the history of victims and the perpetrator society intersect. No chapter of German history has been as marked by the abuse of language as the Third Reich. The interviewed emigrants experienced a forced separation from Germany and Austria, resulting in a linguistic break that banished the German language from their lives. However, thirty or forty years later, for various reasons, they visited their countries of origin and, after initial painful resistance, began to speak German again. Today, it is their favorite language, and the relationship.