The Silence

Anna Goc is a journalist and reporter associated with Tygodnik Powszechny, who has spent years working on topics at the intersection of society, law, and identity. She entered the world of the Deaf gradually, over many years, learning Polish Sign Language, speaking with Deaf people, their families, educators, and activists. The Silence is the product of that long work — a reportage that opens a door into a reality entirely invisible to the hearing.

The book tells two parallel stories: of violence and of emancipation. On one side it reconstructs decades of oralism — the educational ideology that for most of the twentieth century banned Deaf people from using sign language and forced them to learn speech they could not hear. Goc shows how this systemic violence — inflicted in schools for the Deaf, sanctioned by doctors and educators — left its mark on entire generations. Not all Deaf Poles are able to read Polish with comprehension, because for years no one could teach them in a way adapted to their perception.

On the other side, The Silence is a chronicle of emancipation: the story of the Deaf community’s struggle for recognition of Polish Sign Language as a full-fledged language, for access to interpreters, healthcare, and information. The author presents dozens of autobiographical accounts — Deaf children of hearing parents, Deaf children of Deaf parents, people cochlear-implanted as infants, and those to whom an implant was never offered. Each story is different, each speaks of something distinct: about language as a home, about the body as a battlefield, about an identity built in defiance.

Goc writes with empathy but without sentimentality — with respect for the complexity of a community that is itself not uniform in its views on what deafness is: a deficit to be corrected, or simply another way of being in the world. The Silence is a reportage that changes the reader’s perspective — and does not allow them to look at the world of sound in the same way again.