# What was Ingrid Pitt's mother tongue? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [November 23, 2020, 8:54am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-was-ingrid-pitts-mother-tongue/926247 "2020-11-23T08:54:10Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 4\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![psychonaut](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/psychonaut/32/4655_2.png) [@psychonaut](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/psychonaut)\ **Post date:** [November 23, 2020, 8:54am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-was-ingrid-pitts-mother-tongue/926247/1 "2020-11-23T08:54:10Z")
According to Wikipedia, the famous horror actress was born in Warsaw in 1937 to “a father of German Jewish descent and a Polish Jewish mother”. But given what a cultural melting pot Warsaw was at the time, this isn’t enough to identify what language(s) she spoke at home. I suppose the most likely candidates are Polish, German, and Yiddish. Certainly as an adult she could speak German (as evidenced by her career in the German theatre after World War II) and later English, but which language or languages did she speak natively? ---
**Author:** ![dolphinboy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dolphinboy/32/330_2.png) [@dolphinboy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dolphinboy)\ **Post date:** [November 23, 2020, 3:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-was-ingrid-pitts-mother-tongue/926247/2 "2020-11-23T15:54:35Z")
Since Yiddish is related to German, and that her parents were both Jewish, my guess is that one or both of them would have been spoken at home, but she was likely taught Polish at school, so she could probably speak any of these languages depending on the situation… ---
**Author:** ![psychonaut](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/psychonaut/32/4655_2.png) [@psychonaut](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/psychonaut)\ **Post date:** [November 23, 2020, 6:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-was-ingrid-pitts-mother-tongue/926247/3 "2020-11-23T18:08:25Z")
> [@dolphinboy](#): > > but she was likely taught Polish at school I’m not sure she ever went to school in Poland. Her family was taken to a concentration camp when she was only a few years old and I think they remained there for most of the war. ---
**Author:** ![psychonaut](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/psychonaut/32/4655_2.png) [@psychonaut](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/psychonaut)\ **Post date:** [November 23, 2020, 7:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-was-ingrid-pitts-mother-tongue/926247/4 "2020-11-23T19:34:04Z")
Incidentally, she published an autobiography (_Life’s a Scream_) and narrated an autobiographical short film (_Ingrid Pitt: Beyond the Forest_), so perhaps the answer to my question is to be found in those. Has anyone here read the book or seen the film?