El Ladino Salvó Una Vida. How Ladino Saved a Life. - With English subtitles

It's holiday time with Christmas coming up. But not only those of Christian faiths are celebrating these days. Jews are celebrating Hanukah. And we want to wish them a Happy Hanukah. And I will do that here personally. Today we have Susanna Zaraysky. How are you? Good morning! You're an expert and author on the topic of learning foreign languages. And today in "Al Despertar", we want to talk about how to learn a language. Today in "Al Despertar", we want to talk about how we can continue learning languages and why it's important to have a 2nd, 3rd or 4th language, even to save our lives. You have a story about a young boy and how his second language saved his life. There was a 10 year old Jewish boy in Bosnia during the Holocaust. He was a descendant of the Spanish Jews who were expelled from Spain in 1492. His family spoke Ladino, the Spanish Jewish language that was spoken in Spain. It's not Spanish and it's not Hebrew. It's Ladino. It's the language that was spoken in Spain in 1492. Those Jews kept their language that existed 500 years ago. All Jews were sent out to Nazi concentration camps. The boy was with his family in a train with his parents knew they were headed to the concentration camps. At a train stop in Croatia, his parents took one of the floorboards from the train floor and told him to run out of the train alone. ""Run out of the train." We don't want you to go to the camps. The boy was 9 or 10 years old. A soldier who used to be his teacher saw the boy and knew he was Jewish. was Jewish. The soldier wanted to save him from the camps. He told the boy, "Get in that truck." There's an Italian soldier who can take you to a mountain refuge for Jewish kids. And this is because he spoke another language and was able to save his life. Yes, the boy spoke this ancient Spanish from 500 years ago. And he was able to communicate with the soldier who spoke Italian by speaking in Ladino. Do you speak Ladino? No but I was able to understand Ladino spoken by these Bosnians because I speak Spanish. Can you say that it's a dead language? No, it still exists because of Ladino music. There are Ladino speaking communities in Turkey, Israel and Latin America. And now Ladino music is giving life to this language. And in which communities is Ladino being preserved through music? There are Ladino singers in Israel, Turkey and Latin America. And here in the San Francisco area, we have Kat Parra. She learned Ladino songs because she loved the music. Let's give a warm welcome to Kat Parra. Thanks for being here in the studio with us. We're going to listen to Kat and then go for a break. Kat Parra singing "Hanukiah".