In fact, German is obviously much closer to English than to Polish! The difficulty lies in the equally indisputable fact that a large number of Poles I've met greatly overestimate their knowledge of English and believe German to be "harder", therefore less "easy" to communicate in than English:-) The problem is then compounded by the unwillingness of many Poles to accept even polite correction of their English by a guileless native Anglophone!
Older Poles, not too dissimilar to older Russians, many times had childhood experiences (particularly in the countryside or small villages) with local Jews from shtettls who spoke neither tongue, at least not correctly, but rather YIDDISH, a language very close to various southwestern dialects of German, later confusing the two languages and speaking German learned in school with a Polish-Jewish accent, which sounds quite amusing:-)
