Warsaw, Poland ? A railway worker who emerged from a 19-year coma woke to a radically altered Poland and thinks “the world is prettier now” than it was under communism, his wife said Sunday.

Gertruda Grzebska, 63, said that for years she fed her husband Jan carefully with a spoon and moved his body to prevent bed sores.

“For 19 years he did not move or say anything,” Grzebska told The Associated Press by phone. “He tried to say things but it couldn’t be understood. Sometimes we pretended we understood.”

“He was so amazed to see the colorful streets, the goods,” she said. “He says the world is prettier now” than it was 19 years ago, when Poland was still under communist rule.

“I could not talk or do anything, now it’s much better,” Jan Grzebski, 65, told in TVN24 Television in a weak but clear voice, lying in bed at his home in the northern city of Dzialdowo.

“I wake up at 7 a.m. and I watch TV,” he said, smiling slightly.

Despite doctors’ predictions that he would not live, his wife never gave up hope and took care of him at home.

“I would fly into a rage every time someone would say that people like him should be euthanized, so they don’t suffer,” she told local daily Gazeta Dzialdowska.

“He remembers everything that was going on around him,” Grzebska said. “He talks about it and remembers the weddings of our children. He had fever around the time of the weddings, so he knew something big was taking place.”