This lexicon is an exploratory corpus linguistics tool. It surfaces distributional patterns — how often words appear, where they cluster, and what they co-occur with — as evidence for researchers, exhibition visitors, and educators to interpret. It does not make historical claims

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Corpus

The lexicon draws on 397 oral history testimonies (~2.73 million words) in two languages: 261 in Greek (~1.92M words) and 136 in Italian (~0.81M words).

The Greek corpus comprises testimonies from three archives: USHMM (53 testimonies, 13 female / 40 male, ~392K words), Memories of the Occupation in Greece — MoG (27 testimonies, all female, ~355K words), and Istorima (181 testimonies, all female, ~1.17M words).

The Italian corpus consists of CDEC testimonies from Italy (101 testimonies, 48 female / 53 male, ~645K words) and Rhodes (35 testimonies, 30 female / 5 male, ~168K words).

Gender Dimension

A central aim of this lexicon is to examine how female and male survivors narrate the same experiences through different vocabulary. The Italian CDEC corpus provides the cleanest gender comparison, with roughly balanced female (48) and male (53) testimonies from the same archive. The Greek USHMM comparison (13F vs 40M) is the most controlled Greek gender analysis, but the smaller female sample means results should be interpreted with caution.

Gender statistics combine document-level measures (checking how many testimonies use a word, not just how often) with frequency-based measures, to avoid inflating results from a few long testimonies.

Credits

Testimonies are provided by CDEC (Centro di Documentazione Ebraica Contemporanea, Milan), the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), the Memories of the Occupation in Greece project (MoG), and the Istorima oral history project.

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