78th Anniversary of the Liberation of Auschwitz

On January 27, 1945, the Soviet army came upon Auschwitz and its various camps and subcamps.  

What they found was terrible.

Afraid of anyone seeing what they had been doing in Auschwitz, the Germans went on a killing spree before the arrival of the Russians.  They also tried to blow up the ovens where the murdered had been burned for years.  

When the Russians arrived, they found corpses and 7000 starving prisoners.

A conservative estimate is that 1,000,000 people died there.  Two of the them were my mother's aunts, Polish girls who married two Jewish boys.  

Here is a poem I wrote about Auschwitz.  It is based on an incident Tadeusz Borowski, a survivor of Auschwitz, describes in his memoir This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen.  

I wrote the poem after a student at one of my readings asked me if I had one word for everything that happened in Auschwitz and the other German camps.  

The word was fear.

The poem appears in my book Echoes of Tattered Tongues, available from Amazon.  

Fear

During the war, there was only work and death.

The work broke you down, filled your stomach

with rocks and threw you in the river to drown.

The work shoved a bayonet up your ass

and twisted the blade till you were dead.

In the camps, there was only what we ate

and those we worked with—sometimes women.

But we never made love. I’ll tell you why.

Fear. I remember once a thousand men

were working a field with sticks, and trucks came

and dumped naked women in front of us.

Guards were whipping them to the ovens,

and the women screamed and cried to us, pleaded

with their arms stretched out—naked mothers,

daughters, and sisters, but not one man moved.

Not one. Fear will blind you, and tie you up

like nothing else. It’ll whisper, “Just stand still,

soon it will be over. Don’t worry, there’s nothing

you can do.” You will take this fear to the grave

with you. I can promise. And after the war,

it was the same. I saw things that were as bad

as what happened in the camps. I wish

I had had a gun there. I would have

pressed it here to my forehead, right here.

Better that than what I feel now. This fear.

—

The painting is by my friend Mieczyslaw Kasprzyk from his series of paintings of Dante’s Divine Comedy

WHO AM I?

 Who Am I?

I was interviewed recently, and the interviewer asked a question I’ve never been asked by an interviewer.

He asked me who I am.

Personally, I feel that’s an impossible question to answer.

Let me explain why. 45 years ago, I did my PhD dissertation on the sense of the “self” in contemporary literature. The focus was on the “postmodern” notion that there is no definable “self.” According to my research, I cannot explain who I am. All I can give you is a sense of my “self” that is a fiction created out of the bits and pieces of my “self.”

So who am I?

Well, here’s the fiction I’ve created to answer that question: I’m a 74-year old guy with bad knees, vertigo, eyes that can’t focus, constant pain in my back, and two feet I’m always tripping over. My rheumatologist says my body is being taken over by a form of arthritis called “undifferentiated spondyloarthropathy” a mysterious disease affecting everything from my eyeballs to my toes.

But that’s not all I am. I’m also a writer who writes mystery novels, poems, and newspaper columns that have nothing to do with all that. I write about snow and sparrows, the world in the morning, the more mysterious world at night, the friends who are still here and wondering where I’ve gone to, and the friends who are waiting in their graves for my memories to give them some breath. I write about God and aging, my wife and my family, the way a door closes and the way a door waits to be opened. I write a lot about my mom and dad, the lives they had after they left the concentration camps. And I write about standing at a bus stop on the corner of Michigan Ave and Chicago waiting for a passing crucifixion just the way I did when I was a hippie 55 years ago.

So who else am I?

I’m also still what I once was: a kid born in a refugee camp after WWII, growing up in a Polish neighborhood in Chicago, listening to my mother telling me how she saw her mother raped and killed by the Germans, dreaming of Henryk Sienkiewicz and Władysław Reymont, listening to my father telling me about how he watched German soldiers stabbing women in their breasts with bayonets, going to schools and colleges, finding friends and losing friends, teaching and marrying and having a family like no family I had ever had, and growing and growing and growing.

And still that’s not who I am.

Just yesterday, a friend I had in 6th grade got in touch with me on Facebook. I haven’t spoken or written to this guy in more than 60 years. I asked him who I was in 6th grade. He wrote back, “You were a tall, skinny, bad boy.”

I was surprised. I think he had me confused with someone else. Or not.

—

My latest column for the Dziennik Zwiazkowy, the oldest Polish newspaper in America. 

Happy New Year!

 HAPPY NEW YEAR! 

My parents loved New Year’s Eve.

They loved dressing up in their fancy clothes. For weeks, my mom would search the department stores and dress shops on Milwaukee Avenue and Chicago Avenue looking for the most beautiful gown and shoes she could afford. For days, my dad would polish up his shoes again and again and make sure his best suit was free of any wrinkles and tears. They wanted to look as fancy as the Americans they dreamt of being.

They loved the spectacular ballroom they went to on New Year’s, the one in Wicker Park, on Wood Street just north of Division. They loved spending a long evening celebrating the coming year with their friends. These people – like my parents – were survivors. They survived the German invasion of Poland in 1939. They survived the years in the German slave labor camps. They survived seeing their mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers and friends killed by the Germans and the Russians. They survived the hardship of coming to America with nothing more than a wooden trunk filled with the few possessions they were able to gather together in the years they spent in the Displaced Persons camps in Germany waiting for some country like Canada or Australia or the United States to say finally, “Sure, we’ll let you come in, but it won’t be easy on you.”

My mother loved to dance the evening away. My father never learned to dance growing up, and so my mother would dance with anyone who looked like he or she was in need of a partner. She danced polkas and waltzes and tangos. She loved to hear the band on the stage play the old songs like “To ostatnia niedziela” and “Ada, to nie wypada” and “Dobranoc, kochanie” as she swirled around the dance floor with her friends and even strangers. 

Dancing, my mother would once again be the little girl who loved to dance with her sister Genja. My mother would once again be the girl she had been before the war killed her sister and ended all of her childhood.

And while my mom danced, my dad would sit at his table with his friends and talk about the war. They would talk a little about what they themselves suffered, but that wasn’t at the heart of their conversation. Whatever suffering they experienced was nothing compared to the suffering of those who hadn’t survived. My dad and his friends would sit at the table drinking their drinks and talking about the friends they had lost in the war, about Andrzej and Piotr and Janus and Antoni, about their suffering and bleeding and dying.

And dancing and drinking and sharing stories, my parents and their friends said goodbye to the year that had passed and embraced the year that was coming.

— 

My latest column for the Dziennik Zwiazkowy, the oldest Polish newspaper in America.

https://dziennikzwiazkowy.com/felietony2/szczesliwego-nowego-roku-happy-new-year-2/

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