Tag #106330 - Interview #91108 (Boleslaw Janowski)

We tried to speak Polish in our gang. We had mixed success, because some of us could speak Polish better, some worse. Tauba had done her school-leaving exam in Polish, so she spoke Polish well. But Srul Wolman was illiterate; he couldn’t even count to five in Polish. He called the navy ‘the war coat’ [the same word – ‘marynarka’ – means both ‘navy’ and ‘jacket/coat’ in Polish]. I didn’t speak it grammatically either. Even some time after the war I still couldn’t speak Polish well. At one time I thought I was speaking Polish but I was actually speaking Russian.