"SOLDIERS—arrive in Vasenka to “protect our freedom,” speaking a language no one understands. "

I thought of Ingmar Bergman's "The Silence", a film about which I remember almost nothing, other than the boy looking out the window to see a tank lumbering down the empty street. And the film also touches on the way in which the hearing of unintelligible languages enforces a sort of silence... And then I thought of Circassian villagers who, during the 1940s, sheltered a group of Russian Jewish children from St. Petersburg. The villagers successfully hid the children for several months under the noses of Nazi occupiers. One household was often visited by a German officer, so, in order to hide the child's identity, his adoptive parents claimed that the poor child was "mute". (The officer took a liking to him and would bring him chocolates.)