Echoes of Tattered Tongues: Memory Unfolded

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

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...
Friday, November 14, 2025

The Day I was Born in a Refugee Camp

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The Day I Was Born in a Refugee Camp after the War My mother washed her face in cold water, tied her hair back, and put on an old dress.  S...
Tuesday, November 11, 2025

A Veteran’s Day Prose Poem

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Only the  Dead   At first, the men of the burial battalion had tried to bury the dead.   They dug big trenches and deep ditches, and threw t...
Tuesday, August 26, 2025

Talking to My Mother

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 Talking to My Mother I remember one of the last conversations my mom and I had about the war. I had come to visit her in Arizona where she ...
Friday, April 18, 2025

DON’T PICK YOUR NOSE!

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“DON’T PICK YOUR NOSE!” When I was a kid, I heard this all the time.  I heard it from my parents and the nuns and my friends.  I heard it in...
Monday, March 10, 2025

My Books

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My Books I saw an article recently about the ten things that guys like to collect.  It was an interesting list because – for the most part –...
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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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