Echoes of Tattered Tongues: Memory Unfolded

My Parents' Experiences as Polish Slave Laborers in Nazi Germany and Displaced Persons after the War

Saturday, July 18, 2026

Heaven?

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When I get to heaven, I expect to find my mom & dad & my sister at the kitchen table in our old apartment on Evergreen St in Chicago...
Tuesday, July 14, 2026

A Call from a Dying Friend

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I got a call yesterday from an old friend.   He told me he is dying and only has a year or so more.  There is nothing the doctors can do.   ...
Friday, June 26, 2026

My God is God/Your God is the Devil

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My God is God/Your God is the Devil I grew up in a Catholic family.  Went to Catholic schools.  Even thought about being a priest at one tim...
Sunday, June 14, 2026

Change

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 Change I start every day the same way.  After getting myself a cup of coffee, I open my iPad and check out my Facebook page.  I start with ...
Thursday, May 28, 2026

Subhumans in America

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  Subhumans in America As the son of Polish immigrants—people who survived the hell of Nazi forced labor camps—I grew up with a deep convict...
Wednesday, December 24, 2025

Christmas In the Concentration and Slave Camps

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 CHRISTMAS IN THE CAMPS I wanted to write something about Christmas for the Dziennik Zwiazkowy this year that I hadn’t written before.  I’v...
Monday, December 8, 2025

My Dad was an Alcoholic

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My dad didn’t drink during World War II.  He was a Polish slave laborer in Buchenwald Concentration Camp for four years, and in the camps th...
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About Me

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John Guzlowski
I was born in a refugee camp in Germany after World War II, and came with my parents Jan and Tekla and my sister Donna to the United States as Displaced Persons in 1951. My Polish Catholic parents had been slave laborers in Nazi Germany. Growing up in the immigrant and DP neighborhoods around Humboldt Park in Chicago, I met Jewish hardware store clerks with Auschwitz tattoos on their wrists, Polish cavalry officers who still mourned for their dead horses, and women who walked from Siberia to Iran to escape the Russians. My poems try to remember them and their voices. These poems have appeared in my chapbook Language of Mules and in both editions of Charles Fishman’s anthology of American poets on the Holocaust, Blood to Remember. Since retiring from teaching American Literature in 2005, I've written two new books about my parents. My new poems about them appear in my books Echoes of Tattered Tongues (Aquila Polonica, 2017) and True Confessions (Darkhouse Books, 2019).
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