„Potem przemówił komendant Brygady naszej tow. Hiszpan w języku niemieckim i tow. kapt. tłumaczył”

Abstract

And Then the Commander of Our Brigade, Comrade Spanish, talked in German and Comrade Captain Interpreted. Interpretation in the International Brigades during the Civil War in Spain 1936-1939 The aim of the present article is to describe multilingual interactions at the XIII Jarosław Dąbrowski International Brigade between volunteers of different nationalities, mainly Poles, and the Spanish population as narrated by Boruch Nysembaum, a communist from Warsaw and a participant of the Spanish Civil War. At the same time, it is the first presentation of onthe- spot memoirs written by a volunteer who did not return from this war. On the basis of his narrative, the article tries to answer the questions concerning the way volunteers, who lacked adequate foreign language skills, communicated with the Spanish population and with other volunteers, the forms of their communications, and finally, the specific characteristics of this multilingual communication.