I - This morning you were talking to me about certain feelings that the Polish language gives you.

PL - Yes, this too is a conditioned reflex. I mean that as far as I'm concerned, I am a man who talks. The way other people talk, their speech, strikes me a lot. I try to use well my speech of an Italian. Now, Polish was that incomprehensible language that had welcomed us at the end of the trip. And it wasn't the civilized Polish we hear in these hotels, from our guides; It was a rude Polish, made up of slurs and curses, something we didn't understand. It was really the infernal language. German was even more so.

photo courtesy of the author

PL - German was the language of the oppressors, of the executioners. But many of us, I myself, could understand some of it; It was not the unknown language, the language of nothingness. And it impressed me greatly last night, to meet in the elevator two Polish drunks who spoke like then, not like the others around here: they talked cursing, this language which seemed to us made up of only consonants; A truly hellish language...

---