Dad was one of the Displaced Persons who'd been on the allied side during the war. He was told that speaking his own language would hinder my ability to speak English. (There were several children of Displaced Persons at my school and every single one of us was monolingual.)
It was Mum who pushed Dad to tell me something of my heritage. He thought he'd never be able to go home and resisted teaching me the language. According to Mum, it was "Yugoslav".
When I was about 8 I found a series of books in the local library about a brother and sister who travelled all through Europe. One was about Yugoslavia and included a few phrases of the local language.
Then I saw a book called "Teach Yourself Serbo-Croat, the Language of Yugoslavia." It was in the adult section, so Mum borrowed it for me and then ordered a copy. That's how I learned Cyrillic, a few more phrases and numbers.
However, Dad resisted teaching me.
When we were finally able to visit the family when I was 11, I couldn't speak to my relatives. The second time, I'd started to learn Russian at school and that helped me to understand a bit more.
However, I admit to having had a mental block about learning the language over resentment that I was brought up monolingual.
It's a bit of a dichotomy. As a child I had a vague notion that learning any language that I could would help me to learn my dad's language...and then I went through a lengthy phase when I just gave up.
It wasn't helped by being prescribed Clopimramine for my OCD when I was in my 30s...I forgot all my Russian. I thought that it had gone forever until a year or so after stopping them, I realised that it had all come back. (That's why I refused to keep taking anti-depressants after Dh died. I tried them for 3 days and realised that I didn't feel right. One bitten, twice shy.)
I remember that one of the girls with a Polish father and I got joint top for Latin when we were in Third Year. The teacher wanted us both to learn Russian. My parents agreed; the other girl's father went up to the school and apparently spoke to the teacher and ranted at him in fluent Russian: "My daughter will not learn Russian! There is nothing in Russia but poverty."
I believe that a handful of Polish fathers in the area taught Polish to their children, but none of the children in our school knew any. In fact, many of them tried to hide their foreign heritage - in many cases, the family took the wife's name or anglicised the name. My dad's pal had a daughter who picked up some Slovene on family holidays once they were able to go back. To my knowledge, I'm the only one from the area who knows any Serbo-Croatian. (Or as it now is: Bosnian/Croatian/Montenegrin/Serbian.)
When I taught in the area, I had several pupils whose grandfathers had been Displaced Persons and not a single one of them knew a word of their heritage language. Most of the grandfathers had been in the mineworkers' hostel at the same time as Dad. There were Yugoslavs, Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Ukrainians...
Once we started to get pupils from the EU coming to the school where I worked, I always tried to pick up a bit of the language to make it easier for me to teach them English. I basically relied on knowing Russian and a bit of S-C plus buying myself a copy of Teach Yourself (or similar) for the language.
The funniest outcome of that was the time that an interpreter was too embarrassed to translate everything being said by an irate Polish mother who accused the school of racism. [The kid had earlier been excluded for calling another teacher a "black b**ch" and had kicked off in my department, culminating in her suggesting that I eff off.]
I've told the story elsewhere on the boards. She kept ranting about this and that, not realising that I could understand her - so I just translated for the depute when the interpreter had missed things out. He was very quick on the uptake. The interpreter wasn't...
Most of the wartime Poles are now deceased, of course, but there was sometimes tension between them and the newer arrivals. On more than one occasion, I heard the newer [adult] Poles referring to the Polish airmen and soldiers as "the ones that ran away". I suppose that that's what happens when you read the history books written by the Soviets.
I tend not to say too much IRL about my heritage these days and I find myself biting my tongue to an extent on here too.
Sorry. This has been much longer than I intended.