Mother's Day Poem

Mother’s Day Poem

I remember my mother, her old house,

the miracle of her love, her fingers

on my cheek brushing away the night,

the world coming home for breakfast,

her eyes asking if I’d been on the road

for long and was the traffic heavy.

Nothing speaks of love like her kindness,

not the birds swirling in the mountains

nor starlight in the trees.  Nothing speaks

of hope like her silent prayers for me

in the morning before school or the bread

and soup she placed before me at night.

Some people seek comfort in a priest,

the way he washes his hands in holy water,

raises his chin to drink the wine.  But it’s mothers

who divide the loaves and fishes, collect

the crumbs, sweep the floor, and find lost coins.

One day they’ll call us home for the last supper. 

___________________________________

To read more about my mom and her life please click on the following:  a blog I did called "Remembering My Mother."  

Nightmare's End--One Soldier's Story

My wife's Uncle Buddy was one of the GIs who liberated the many concentration camps in Nazi Germany.  Several years ago he was interviewed by documentarians making a film about the liberation of the camps.

Here's a part of his statement:



______________________________

Here's another post I did about Uncle Buddy and his war time experience.  Click here.

Language and Loss

My friend the writer Christina Sanantonio and I have been having a conversation about writing about loss.  It’s a conversation that started right after the suicide of the novelist David Foster Wallace. I posted two blogs about his death and the deaths of writers in general and what they mean to us, and Christina wrote me a long letter about how we use or don’t use language to talk about loss.  She said that, after her brother died unexpectedly, she felt that the language available to her was inadequate to express what she felt about his death.  Here’s a part of what she wrote:

I felt such a great expanse of void between the sense of reality that my grief had laid bare and the experiences of others who had not known despair that I felt I was living in a parallel universe -- alone. The weight and loneliness of my small burden was enough to keep me tottering, and often looking longingly into inky voids. I found myself thrust into a universe where few could speak my language, the complex and limited language of loss.

         In trying to explain this feeling, she went on to wrote about Primo Levi, the Holocaust survivor and writer who, like David Foster Wallace, apparently took his own life.  Primo Levi talked about the frustration of trying to write about loss and suffering, especially the loss and suffering so many experienced in the Nazi camps.  He felt sometimes, Christina wrote, that we needed a new language, a language of the lager, a language of the concentration camps.   Common words for “cold, pain, hunger,” according to Primo Levi, could not convey what the people experienced in the camps.  Reflecting on what Primo Levi wrote about the inadequacy of language and what she herself experienced following her brother’s death, Christina wrote that “We ache for a language that doesn’t exist.”

What Christina wrote about her loss and about Levi’s sense of the failure of language touched me.  I’ve spent the last 30 years trying to find words to describe what my parents went through in the concentration and slave labor camps in Germany during World War II and what those experiences made me feel.  Since I was a child, I had heard the stories my father told about what happened to him and my mother.  He told me about how he was picked up during a round-up in his village in Poland, and how he was sent to Germany and spent four years in the concentration camps there.  He told me how my mother was captured by the Germans when they came to her house; how they killed her mother, her sister and her sister’s baby; how my mother survived the killing by breaking through a window and hiding in the woods near her home; and how finally the Germans captured her and took her to Germany as a slave.  My father told me how, in the years my parents spent under the Nazis, they both saw terrible things.  They saw the normal pain and suffering of being prisoners under the Nazis, and they saw floggings, hangings, stonings, shootings, castrations, and rapes.   In one of my poems, “Looking for Work in America,” I wrote that my father “knew death the way a blind man/knows his mother’s voice.”  The same was true for my mother.

           For the last thirty years, I’ve tried to find words to describe my parents’ experiences.  In my poems and my lectures about my parents, I write or talk about the things I heard about, but no matter how powerful the original event described by my mother or father I seldom feel that I can really describe it, explain it, bring it out of the past.  I can’t bring it out of memory into this life.  Despite my best efforts, I’m finally left pushing around some words, trying to find some way to convey what I felt as a child hearing my parents’ story for the first time.  Sometimes, I think I have almost succeeded, most of the time I know I’m not even close. 

         One of the things I’ve tried to do to bring my parents’ experiences out of memory is to use the sort of language they used.   People who read my poems or hear me speak remark on the simplicity of my language and the story-like quality of my poems.  What I’m trying to do is to capture the way I first heard the stories.  My parents had very little education. My father was an orphan and a farm boy in rural Poland; he never went to school.  Even as an adult in America, he could barely write his name.  If he were asked to write his name on a check or a Christmas card, he would become embarrassed.  My mother had a little bit more education.  She spent about two years off and on in a rural school in eastern Poland.  She could write her name, do sums, read a prayer book or a newspaper.  I’ve tried to use the sort of language that my parents’ used.  It was a language free of emotions. When my parents told me many of the stories that became my poems, they spoke in plain, straightforward language. They didn’t try to emphasize the emotional aspect of their experience; rather, they told their stories in a matter-of-fact way. This happened, they’d say, and then this happened:  The soldier kicked her, and then he shot her, and then he moved on to the next room. I’ve also tried to make the poems story-like, strong in narrative drive to convey the way they were first told to me.

         For me the poems that work best are the ones with my parents’ actual language.  Those words, for me, are the real thing.  In one of my poems, my mother says to me, “If they give you bread, you eat it.  If they beat you, you run”; in another poem, my dad tells me what he said to the German guards who beat him and tormented him, “Please, sirs, never tell your children what you’ve done to me today.”  There are bits and pieces of their words scattered through my poems, and when I read those words out loud my parents are there with me.  My parents’ words are a kind of magic for me. 

But how does one convey this magic to other people? 

I think sometimes that all I can do is read my poems out loud and show people how the poems effect me.  I guess what happens then is that my words become like my parents’ words.  I become my father and mother for that moment in the poem.  Sometimes this touches people, conveys the magic to them.

I’ve seen this happen in some of the poetry readings I’ve given.  I was recently giving a reading/lecture, and when I got done, I took questions.  There were some of the usual questions about where in Poland my parents came from and why I wrote poems rather than memoirs.  Then, a person in the back stood up and didn’t say anything.  He looked like he wanted to say something, but he just stood there.  I don’t know if the person even had a question.  Maybe he just wanted to show how much he felt my parents’ lives, or maybe the loss I talked about somehow reminded him of a loss he experienced and couldn’t talk about and still can’t talk about.  For me, that was a moment filled with magic.  My parents’ experiences had somehow survived my translation of them into the word of my poems, and by another miracle, the poems had spoken to another person and touched him with their loss.  A miracle.

 For me one of the central images of the Bible is the image of the Tower of Babel.  It represents in my eyes the moment when humanity became trapped in language that would not communicate what we needed to communicate.   What happened at Babel was a second fall from grace.  Our lives became chained to a language that doesn’t convey what we feel or what we mean.  Although we have this deep need to say what we feel, we often can’t explain it to ourselves or to other people.  

Sometimes our words fail us, and sometimes other people fail us.  They can’t bring themselves to listen to our stories of loss.  It’s hard to take on that burden.  To show you this, I want to tell two stories.  The first is about my father in the concentration camp at Buchenwald.  The second is about my mother and me and a poem I wrote about her experiences. 

 My father used to tell a story about a friend of his in the camps who made love to a woman and contracted VD.  He came to my father and asked him what should he do.  My father looked him in the eye and said, “Go to the river and drown yourself.”  His friend thought he was joking, and he went to another friend who told him, “Tell the Germans what you did.”  He did and they killed the woman; and then they beat him and castrated him and killed him.  Fifty years later, when my father was telling me this story, he still didn’t know what he could have said to his friend to save him from what happened.

And thirty years after writing my first poems about my parents, I’m still not sure I get their experiences right no matter how much I try.  One of the first poems I wrote about my mother is called “Cattle Train to Magdeburg.”  When I wrote it in 1978, I was trying to capture what had happened to her when the Nazis first put in the boxcars and sent transported her from her home in eastern Poland to Magdeburg, Germany, a clearing center for slave laborers sent to Germany.  My sense of what had happened was based in part on what my parents had told me about that experience and what I imagined the experience was like. 

Here’s the poem:

Cattle Train To Magdeburg

She still remembers

The long train to Magdeburg

the box cars

bleached gray

by Baltic winters

The rivers and the cities

she had never seen before

and would never see again:

the sacred Vistula

the smoke haunted ruins of Warsaw

the Warta, where horse flesh

met steel and fell

The leather fists

of pale boys

boys her own age

perhaps seventeen

perhaps nineteen

but different

convinced of their godhood

by the cross they wore

different from the one

she knew in Lvov

The long twilight journey

to Magdeburg

four days that became six years

six years that became forty

And always a train of box cars

bleached to Baltic gray.

This poem was first published in Charles Fishman’s anthology Blood to Remember: American Poets on the Holocaust in the early 1990’s.  When I showed it to my father, he couldn’t read it because he couldn’t read English, and when I showed it to my mother, she wouldn’t read it. That was all in the past, she said. She didn’t want to think about the war and what her life was like in the camps. 

In 2002, a Polish version of Language of Mules, my first collection of poems about my parents, was published, and I showed a copy to my mother. Since my father had died, she’d become more willing to talk about her experiences in Germany. So she took the book and opened it up; the first poem she saw was “Cattle Train to Magdeburg.” She read it straight through and told me what she thought. She said, “That wasn’t the way it was at all,” and then she started telling me what I got wrong in her story about being taken to the concentration camps in Germany.  This was wrong and that wasn’t like that.  She wanted me to know all the things I got wrong.  Despite my best effort to find language to describe her experience, I had failed her and failed her experience.  As I suggested earlier, sometimes our words fail us, and sometimes we fail other people, the ones who want to share their words of loss with us.

My mother’s response to my poem led me to write another poem.  It’s called “My Mother Reads ‘Cattle Train to Magdeburg.’” It’s the Prologue to my recent collection of poems about my parents, Lightning and Ashes.  The language in this poem is pretty much the way my mother gave her reaction to my poem.  After she finished speaking, I took up a legal pad and wrote what I remember her saying.  Here’s the poem:

My Mother Reads "Cattle Train to Magdeburg"

She reads it through and says

“That’s not how it was.

I couldn’t see anything

except when they stopped

the boxcars and opened the doors

And I didn’t see

any of those rivers,

and if I did, I didn’t know

their names. No one said,

‘Look, look this river

is the Warta, and there

that’s the Vistula.’

What I remember

is the bodies being

pushed out—sometimes

women would kick them out

with their feet.

Now it sounds terrible.

You think we were bad women

but we weren’t. We were girls

taken from homes, alone.

Some had seen terrible things

done to their families.

Even though you’re a grown man

and a teacher, we saw things

I don’t want to tell you about.”

If she were still alive and I were to show her this second poem, I’m betting she would say the same thing she said after I showed her the Polish version of the earlier poem, “That wasn’t the way it was at all,” and I know she would be right.

         Christina Sanantonio said, “We ache for a language that doesn’t exist.”  We all want this language.  Christina wants it so she can tell me and other people how much his death means to her.  Primo Levi wanted it so that he could tell you what hunger and snow and wind meant to a man standing through a six-hour roll call with other prisoners in Auschwitz.  We want others to understand what we have suffered and what we have lost.  This is the “ache” that Christina talks about.  It is a part of language as sure as the word “the.”  We ache for a language that doesn’t exist so that we can tell someone what we need to say.  And even when we feel that there is no point in struggling with words to capture what we need to say, we still have to try.  No matter how hard it is to tell someone something, no matter how much we misunderstand what someone is telling us, no matter how hard it is to get beyond the Babel we’re caught up in, I think we need to try.

         Will it change the world?  Make anything different?  Better?

We can only hope.

Liberation of Buchenwald Concentration Camp, April 11, 1945

On April 11, 1945, American troops liberated Buchnewald Concentration Camp.  It was a large camp housing about 80,000 prisoners, Poles, Slovenians, Frenchmen, Africans, and others.  They were brought there to work in the factories that the Germans built in and around the camp. 

We have a lot of documentation and photos from this liberation because the great American journalist and photographer Margaret Bourke-White was with the US Army when they liberated this camp.  She took photographs that captured the suffering of the men who were in the camp.

Here’s one of her photos.

My father was a prisoner in this camp for four years.  He was just a Polish farm boy, and he was captured when he went into his village to buy a piece of rope one Saturday.  The Germans had surrounded the village and were rounding up men and boys to go to Buchenwald and work in the factories there.

A lot of times when we think of Concentration Camps we imagine the death camps the Germans built in Poland where the primary business was killing large numbers of civilians.  Buchenwald wasn’t a death camp.  Millions did not die there, burned in the ovens, their ashes scattered in ponds where the water is still gray 70 years later.  But they did die there.  About one out four people died each year. 

What did they die of in Buchenwald?

Mainly starvation.  Fifty years later, my dad could still remember the hunger he felt.  He did hard labor 6 and even 7 days a week, 12 and 14 hour days, on a handful of food a day.  I’ve read accounts of what the men ate.  It came to about 600 calories a day. How much is that?  A Big Mac with Cheese is about 700 calories.  A Big Mac without cheese is 600.  But what my dad ate wasn’t a Big Mac.

I asked my dad once how he was able to stay alive.  He shrugged and said he didn’t know.  He said that most of the time the guards gave them a kind of gray gruel made out of some kind of grain and animal bones.  My dad called it “Hitler’s secret weapon.”  It wasn’t enough to keep a man alive, so my dad was always looking for things to stick into his mouth: twigs, pieces of paper, bits of cloth, leather buttons.  Once when he complained about the food, a guard hit him across his head with a club.  He knocked my dad down to the ground, but my dad got up and begged for food.  It was the wrong thing to say.  The guard clubbed my dad unconscious.  When my dad awoke, he was blind in one eye. 

But men didn’t only die of hunger.  People died for simple infractions, annoying the guards by urinating out of turn, slouching in line, standing in the wrong place. 

They died of cruelty too.  My father told me a story about one cold January night when the 400 men in his barracks were called out into the square for a roll call.  The men were dressed in rags, torn pants and shirts.  Some had shoes, others didn’t.  They had almost no protection from the snow and wind.  The guards lined them up in rows and told them they had to check the roster of prisoners, and then the Germans started reading the long lists of names.  As the guards read, men started dropping into the snow, falling to their knees and then keeling over.  And the guards kept reading.  They read through the roster once and then they said, “Oops, we missed a name,” and then they read through the roster again and again and again for six hours while men fell to their knees and died in the snow.  The next morning garbage carts came and collected the dead and took them to the ovens.  

Others died from overwork, hangings, experiments, crucifixions.  One of my father’s friends, an artist from Wilno, was first castrated and then hanged. 

One in every four died like this.  A lot of Margaret Bourke-White’s photos are of the dead, in piles like worthless paper, like rubbish.

But there are also many pictures of those who survived.

And when I look at the photos Margaret Bourke-White took the day the camp was liberated, I look for the face of my dad.  Thin as a shoelace, blind in one eye, with a scar across his skull where the guard beat him and beat him and beat him.  I haven’t found my dad yet, but I know I’ll recognize him when I see him.  

__________________________________________

Margaret Bourke-White's photos of Buchenwald originally appeared in Life magazine.  Life Online offers 20 of them, some never before published.  You can see them by clicking here:    http://life.time.com/history/liberation-of-buchenwald-the-story-behind-an-iconic-life-photo-1945/#1

If you want to know more about my dad and his experiences in the war, you can get a copy of my book Lightning and Ashes, available at Amazon.  Lighting and Ashes contains the chapbook Third Winter of War: Buchenwald, about my dad's experiences in that camp.

What My Father Believed: An Easter Post

My father grew up in poverty, an orphan working on a farm in Poland. When he was 20, he was taken to a concentration camp in Germany.  He didn't have much education at all, could barely read and write. But he had faith. This is a poem about what he believed.



What My Father Believed

He didn’t know about the Rock of Ages

or bringing in the sheaves or Jacob’s ladder

or gathering at the beautiful river

that flows beneath the throne of God.

He’d never heard of the Baltimore Catechism

either, and didn’t know the purpose of life

was to love and honor and serve God.

He‘d been to the village church as a boy

in Poland, and knew he was Catholic

because his mother and father were buried

in a cemetery under wooden crosses.

His sister Catherine was buried there too.

The day their mother died Catherine took

to the kitchen corner where the stove sat,

and cried.  She wouldn’t eat or drink, just cried

until she died there, died of a broken heart.

She was three or four years old, he was five.

What he knew about the nature of God

and religion came from the sermons

the priests told at mass, and this got mixed up

with his own life.  He knew living was hard,

and that even children are meant to suffer. 

Sometimes, when he was drinking he’d ask,

“Didn’t God send his own son here to suffer?”

My father believed we are here to lift logs

that can’t be lifted, to hammer steel nails

so bent they crack when we hit them.

In the slave labor camps in Germany,

He’d seen men try the impossible and fail.

He believed life is hard, and we should

help each other.  If you see someone

on a cross, his weight pulling him down

and breaking his muscles, you should try

to lift him, even if only for a minute,

even though you know lifting won’t save him.

______________________

Garrison Keillor reads my poem at his Writers Almanack.  Click here: http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/index.php?date=2007/12/28 

Valentine's Day: A World War II Love Story

My parents met in a concentration camp in Germany toward the end of World War II.


My mom had been brought to Germany by the Nazis to work in a slave labor camp. The day she was captured she saw her mom and her sister and her sister's baby killed by German soldiers. My mom was crying so much when she got to the camp that one of the guards said if she didn't stop crying they would shoot her.

Near the end of the war, my dad and some other slave laborers were brought to my mom's camp by German guards who were escaping the Russians. The Germans left him there and fled toward the American lines. When my mom saw my dad, he was a scarecrow in rags. He weighed about 70 pounds and had only one eye. He had lost the other when a guard clubbed him for begging for food.

She was 23, he was 25. She had been a slave for 2 years, he had been one for 4.

They met in that camp, and after liberation they did what a lot of people did. First, they had something to eat, and then they got married.

It was a hell of a marriage. They fought and argued for the next 50 years -- even on Sunday mornings -- and even on Christmas Day.

It got so bad at times that -- after we came to America -- my sister and I would plead with my parents to get a divorce.

They never did. When my dad died in 1997, they were still married. 52 years.

When I was about 57 or 58, I started wondering why they didn't get a divorce, why they stayed together through all the misery they put each other through. The answer to that question became a poem in my book about them, Lightning and Ashes. The poem is called "Why My Mother Stayed with My Father."


Why My Mother Stayed with My Father

She knew he was worthless the first time
she saw him in the camps: his blind eye,
his small size, the way his clothes carried
the smell of the dead men who wore them before.

In America she learned he couldn’t fix a leak
or drive a nail straight. He knew nothing
about the world, the way the planets moved,
the tides. The moon was just a hole in the sky,

electricity a mystery as great as death.
The first time lightning shorted the fuses,
he fell to his knees and prayed to Blessed Mary
to bring back the miracle of light and lamps.

He was a drunk too. Some Fridays he drank
his check away as soon as he left work.
When she’d see him stagger, she’d knock him down
and kick him till he wept. He wouldn’t crawl away.

He was too embarrassed. Sober, he’d beg
in the bars on Division for food or rent
till even the drunks and bartenders
took pity on this dumb polack.

My father was like that, but he stayed
with her through her madness in the camps
when she searched among the dead for her sister,
and he stayed when it came back in America.

Maybe this was why my mother stayed.
She knew only a man worthless as mud,
worthless as a broken dog would suffer
with her through all of her sorrow.

________

If you want to read more about my parents, you can check out a couple of the blogs here that talk mostly about them. One is called DPs in the Polish Triangle about what my mom and dad were like when they got to America. Another is called The Wooden Trunk We Carried With Us From Germany. There's also The Day My Mother Died.

Just click on the above titles, and it will take you right to them.

Remembering My Mom

My mother died seven years ago this January 18.  She died in a hospice in Sun City, Arizona.  

When she died, we had her funeral service near Darien, Illinois, where my sister Donna lives.  She made the arrangements for the services and the burial later up in Niles, Illinois, at St. Adalbert's Cemetery.

The priest who was going to perform the service was Father Bob, and he didn't know my mom at all so I offered to send him some information about her.  

Here's the letter I sent him: 

Dear Father Bob,

My sister Donna tells me that you will be doing the memorial service for my mother Teresa Guzlowski, and that you might like some information about her.

I’m not sure what my sister told you.  But here are some things I know about my mom. 

My mother was born in a village west of Lvov in Poland in 1922.  She lived there with her mother and father and sisters and brothers.  Her dad was a forest warden and they lived a quiet, peaceful life.  She liked telling stories of what it was like being a kid living near a forest.  She liked to pick mushrooms and sing and ride her pet pig Caroline.  She liked to joke that the pig Caroline was smarter than her brothers.

This all changed of course when World War II started.  In 1942, she was taken to a Nazi concentration camp in Germany.  She left behind her mother, his sister and her sister’s baby, all killed by the Nazis and those who collaborated with them. 

For the next 3 years she worked on the farms connected to the Buchenwald Concentration District.  She worked in the fields and the barns.  She said it wasn’t a death camp, but rather a slow death camp.  And she used to say that a lot of the pain she felt later in life in her legs and back came from work she did in those camps. 

When the war ended in 1945, she married my father Jan who had also been a slave laborer, and the two of them lived in refugee camps in Germany until 1951.  That year my parents, my sister and I were allowed to immigrate to America.

When we first got to the US, my parents and my sister and I worked on a farm in upstate New York to pay off part of the money that it cost to bring us to the states.

My mother once told me a funny story about this time. 

My sister and I were 5 and 3 years old respectively.  But we were still expected to work.  One time we were picking straw berries and we started complaining how hard the work was.  We started crying and begging our parents to let us go back to Germany and the refugee camps.  Life, we said, was easier there.  My mother told us that this was America and we had to stay here.

After putting in a year on the farm, we came to Chicago and lived in the Polish areas along Milwaukee Avenue.  Both of my parents worked hard.  My mom worked in a factory, in a molding room where she would work with hot plastic.  The plastic would be pressed into a mold to make telephone and such.  She would come home from work with burns on her arms from the plastic.

When she died, the scars were still on her hands and arms.  I bet if you look in the coffin you will see them still.

Both my parents worked hard at minimum wage jobs.  My mother often worked the midnight to 8 in the morning shift, so she could be around when we were home.  But their hard work paid off, and they were able to buy a house and to send my sister and me to Catholic grade schools and high schools.  This education gave me a love for learning that I’ve never lost and that led me to get a Ph.D. in English Literature and to spend my life teaching others and trying to convey to them what my parents taught me about the value of an education.

My parents retired to Arizona in the early 90s, and my dad died there in 1997.  Since then my mother lived alone, taking care of herself.  She was fiercely independent and didn’t want to be beholding to anyone.  When she went into the hospital that last time, she was still living alone, even though she could hardly stand and every step took effort that would break some one with less resolve.

In summary, what I would like to say about my mom is that she was a very very strong person.  She survived the camps and she survived a life of working on factory assembly lines and in skyscrapers where she cleaned offices from midnight until 8 in the morning taking out other people’s garbage and polishing the stains off of their desks.  And she survived the sometimes turbulent relationship she had with my dad and my sister and me.

If you could have seen her when she was dying, you would have seen that same desire to go on, to survive, even when there was little hope that she would ever be able to walk or talk or hear or breathe the way she had before her strokes.  For the last two years, when she and I talked, she would often say, “Johnny, how can I live without hope?” 

I don’t know how she did it—but she did.  She lived without hope.

This isn’t to say that she was a saint.  A lot of times when we think about those who die, especially when they suffered so much in the concentration camps and had seen so much suffering in their own lives, we want to eulogize them, talk about what was good and blessed in their lives; but my mother wasn’t the kind of person who would want us to turn from the truth.  And the truth here was that her experiences and her suffering made her hard and made her cold.  I sometimes think that she may have survived the war but what she left back in the camps was her heart. 

Here’s a poem I wrote about her:

What the War Taught Her

My mother learned that sex is bad,

Men are worthless, it is always cold

And there is never enough to eat.

She learned that if you are stupid

With your hands you will not survive

The winter even if you survive the fall.

She learned that only the young survive

The camps.  The old are left in piles

Like worthless paper, and babies

Are scarce like chickens and bread.

She learned that the world is a broken place

Where no birds sing, and even angels

Cannot bear the sorrows God gives them.

She learned that you don't pray

Your enemies will not torment you. 

You only pray that they will not kill you.

_______________________________



My book Lighting and Ashes tells the story of my parents.  You can also read some other blogs about my mom and dad:  

An earlier post about the day my mom died.  

Two Lives Shaped by World War Two: A Video

Valentine's Day: A World War Two Love Story