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Marek Edelman (1919-2009) was the last surviving leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. He had remained in Poland following the Nazi defeat and was active in domestic and international politics while at the same time becoming one of Poland’s leading cardiologists. [Listeners: Anka Grupinska, Joanna Klara Agnieszka Zuchowska, Joanna Szczesna; date recorded: 2003]
TRANSCRIPT: [L] Was Polish your first language?
Russian.
[L] And then Yiddish?
No, then Polish and only then in school, out in the yard. No, no Russian was first. I couldn't speak any Polish, at home we didn't speak Polish - it was either French or Russian. Jan Strysz spoke Polish. Who else? The intelligentsia speaking Polish? No way. But my mother learned to speak Polish very quickly and she spoke it very well but I spoke ... after all, I had a Russian nanny who caught typhus and a grey ambulance took her away when I was 3 or 4 years old to a hospital for infectious diseases, and she died there. I saw that ambulance, I can still see it, a grey ambulance for infectious cases. And that's all, in Russian. I learned to speak Polish quite late.
