The School of Humanities & Languages invites you to join this online seminar with Professor Peter Davies, the University of Edinburgh.
Unlike the interpreters at the Nuremberg Tribunal, who were well aware of their role in making history and in developing innovative technical advances, the sixteen interpreters who worked during the trial of 22 Auschwitz personnel in Frankfurt in the mid 1960s left few public statements. But they played a key role in the success of the trial, both behind the scenes and in court, interpreting for dozens of Auschwitz survivors, speaking eleven languages, who had made the trip to West Germany. The only one who attracted public attention for her work and who left a substantial trace in the archive record was the Polish-Russian-German interpreter Wera Kapkajew.
This paper will explore Kapkajew’s contribution to the trial proceedings and will ask what happens when an interpreter’s work becomes visible in a Holocaust trial, considering the quality criteria used to assess her work in a context in which victims’ voices were subject to intense judicial and public scrutiny. It will consider the interpreter’s role within the court’s knowledge processes, making the experiences of victims, and their struggles to find language for them, accessible and useful for the court.
CONTACT
For all enquiries, please email l.stern@unsw.edu.au
Peter Davies is a Professor of Modern German Studies at the University of Edinburgh, UK. He has published on the translation of Holocaust testimonies and is the author of Interpreting at the First Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial: How can a witness speak? (Bloomsbury, forthcoming 2025) and Witness between languages: The translation of Holocaust testimony in context (Boydell & Brewer, 2018). He is co-author, with Hannah Holtschneider, Sheila Jelen and Christoph Thonfeld, of Olga Lengyel, Auschwitz Survivor: Interdisciplinary Explorations (Palgrave, forthcoming 2025), and is co-editor with Jean Boase-Beier, Andrea Hammel and Marion Winters, of Translating Holocaust Lives (Bloomsbury, 2018). He is currently contributing to a project on the testimonies of female physicians who survived Auschwitz, and is researching the portrayal of the Holocaust in German audio drama.
