Lightning and Ashes

The Day My Mother Died

2012-01-14T16:59:00.000-08:00

My mother died six years ago, January 27, 2006. She died in a hospice in Sun City, Arizona. It was a beautiful place, out in the desert, cactus and sage and rocks and reddish sand all around. She would have liked it. Before she got too sick, she used to like sitting outside and enjoying the little bit of desert that she had in her own back yard.

She had come a long way to die.

She was born in a forest outside a small village west of Lvov, Poland in 1920. She loved that forest and probably would have stayed there her whole life except for the Germans. They came to her house and killed her mother and her sister and her sister's baby. My mother fled into the woods, but the soldiers caught her and put her on a train that took her to a slave labor camp in Germany. Once I asked my mother to tell me what happened on that train. She said that even though I was a grown man and a professor, she saw things she couldn't tell me about.

For a long time, she also wouldn't tell me much about the slave labor camps in Germany. She would wave her hand at me and just say, "If they give you bread, you eat it. If they beat you, you run away." When she did start telling me about the things that happened in the camp, some times I had to ask her not to tell me.

At the end of the war, my mother met my father, another Pole who had been in the slave labor camps. 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 married and waited in the refugee camps in Germany until someone in America would agree to sponsor them so that they could come here. They waited for 6 years. During that time, they had two kids, my sister Danusha and me.

In June of 1951, we came to America. For a while my mom and dad worked on a farm to pay off their passage here. Then, we moved to Chicago, and my mom worked in a factory.

The way I remember it my Mom was always working, working in one factory or another and working around the houses she and my Dad bought. She would plaster walls, paint, sand floors, and varnish them too. There was no work that she wouldn't do.

When my parents retired, they finally moved out to Sun City, Arizona, a long way from the village in Poland my mom grew up in. After he died out there in 1997, she lived there alone, taking care of her house and the garden, making friends and thinking about her grandchildren.

I've written a lot of poems about her over the years, and since the day she died,I've been trying to write a poem about her dying. Let me tell you, it's not coming. I've got pages of notes and half starts for the poem, but for some reason none of the words and lines say what I want them to say about my mom and how I feel about her and how her death touched me. Maybe I'll be able to write the poem someday, but I can't do it right now.

So I want to end this with two of my favorite poems about my mom from my book Lightning and Ashes. The first one is called "What the War Taught Her," and the second is called "My Mother's Optimism."

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 Mother's Optimism

When she was seventy-eight years old
And the angel of death called to her
and told her the vaginal bleeding
that had been starting and stopping
like a crazy menopausal period
was ovarian cancer, she said to him,
“Listen Doctor, I don’t have to tell you
your job. If it’s cancer it’s cancer.
If you got to cut it out, you got to.”

After surgery, in the convalescent home
Among the old men crying for their mothers,
And the silent roommates waiting for death
she called me over to see her wound,
stapled and stitched, fourteen raw inches
from below her breasts to below her navel.
And when I said, “Mom, I don’t want to see it,”
She said, “Johnny, don't be such a baby.”

Six months later, at the end of her chemo,
my mother knows why the old men cry.
A few wiry strands of hair on head,
Her hands so weak she couldn’t hold a cup,
Her legs swollen and blotched with blue lesions,
She says, “I’ll get better. After his chemo,
Pauline’s second husband had ten more years.
He was playing golf and breaking down doors
When he died of a heart attack at ninety.”

Then my mom’s eyes lock on mine, and she says,
“You know, optimism is a crazy man’s mother.”

And she laughs.

______________________________

The first photo is my mom, my sister, and me in Riverview Amusement Park in Chicago, around 1957.

The second photo is of my mom and my daughter Lillian, around 1982.

Photographs by German Soldiers

2012-01-05T10:47:00.000-08:00

Recently, I came across a site that features thousands of photographs taken by German Soldiers as they invaded Poland and spread across the country. The site is called Bagnowka. You can click here to enter it.

The photos are mundane and touching, directed and random, unexpected and expected. There are no captions, no explanations, so that I find myself wondering about them, about who took them and what happened to the person who took them and what happened to the people who appear in the photos. Finally, I realized I'll never know, and I just kept looking through the photos.

What I do know, however, is that the photos show me something of what life was like for the German invaders and the Poles who suffered the invasion.

You can look at the photos individually, and they are arranged in fourteen different groups: Sept. 1939, Children of War, Life in Wartime, Warsaw and other towns, Holocaust, Expulsion, Damages, Russia, War Prisoners, War Victims, Horses, Communism, Collaboration, and War Cemeteries.

Also, a number of the photos have been gathered together as youtube videos under themes or topics accompanied by music. Here's one of them, called Butchers of Warsaw.

Imaginary Witness: Hollywood and the Holocaust

2011-11-14T10:56:00.001-08:00

Recently, I watched "Imaginary Witness," a terrific documentary about how Hollywood has depicted the Holocaust, and even though I think I know a lot about both Hollywood and the Holocaust, I found that I learned a number of things from this documentary. I mentioned to Danusha Goska that I had just seen the film, and she told me that she had also recently seen it and that she was writing a piece about it. When I said that I wanted to read it, she said that she'd be happy to pass it on to me when she finished.

Here's her review:

Imaginary Witness: Hollywood and the Holocaust

2004

Directed by Daniel Anker

Produced by Daniel Anker and Ellin Baumel

Narrated by Gene Hackman

Commentators include authors Michael Berenbaum, Thane Rosenbaum, Neal Gabler, Annete Insdorf, Norma Barzman, Sharon Rivo,

And directors, producers, screenwriters and actors Steven Spielberg, Branko Lustig, Robert Clary, Rod Steiger, Sidney Lumet, Vincent Sherman, Stanley Frazen, Gene Reynolds, Malvin Wald, George Stevens Jr, Martin Starger, Abby Mann, Robert Berger

92 minutes

The Holocaust: I was not there, and neither were you, yet we both know it happened. We know it happened, we are certain of the immense, implausible evil of it all, because someone told us the story. See? Storytelling really is central. As incredible as it may sound, no storytelling, no Holocaust. Without storytelling, the Holocaust would disappear, like last year's snow.

Stories are not natural products that pop out of our mouths the way that flowers sprout from soil. Humans engineer stories. We select this fact, and not that one. We highlight this event, and not the other. We do this in response to our audience's ability to hear what we have to say, and to achieve our own goal. The story of the Holocaust has changed over time, from teller to teller. In the immediate post-war era, as the 2001 radio show "This American Life" episode, "Before It Had a Name," reported, people were overwhelmed, and even survivors themselves didn't know how to tell their own story. Under the decades of Soviet domination, communists tried to turn Auschwitz into a site of class struggle, rather than, primarily, Jewish martyrdom. James Carroll's much lauded 2001 book, "Constantine's Sword," played games with the number of Polish non-Jews who were imprisoned and died at Auschwitz, thus rewriting the camp's history and significance to Poles and Jews. It is essential in understanding the Holocaust that we understand storytelling, too.

"The TV miniseries 'The Holocaust' had more impact in Germany than the original event." Film historian Michael Berenbaum's joke is an exaggeration. The kernel of truth at its heart is this: a Hollywood production forced Germans to confront the Holocaust in a way that many had not confronted the original event. Again and again the commentators in the 2004 documentary "Imaginary Witness: Hollywood and the Holocaust" attest to the power of storytelling through film to affect audience understanding of a world-historical event. As the documentary reports: "This most horrific chapter in modern world history happened far from America's shores. It has been American movies, perhaps more than any other medium, that have shaped how we understand and remember these events."

"Imaginary Witness" is an excellent introduction into understanding how the Holocaust story is told. The original music, by Andrew Barrett, creates a mood of intellectual inquiry, but also of the ache of a deep, unhealed wound. The scripted narration is beautifully, powerfully written – something one can't say about most documentaries, where words play second fiddle to images. Gene Hackman's narration hits the proper note of authority, respect and compassion. At several points in the documentary, I had to pause the frame because the film clip I had just watched was so overwhelmingly moving. This is especially true of the scenes selected from two different films, shown in two different media, and made in two different eras. "War and Remembrance" is a 1988 TV miniseries made five decades after the start of World War Two. It depicts naked victims falling to Nazi bullets and Zyklon B. "The Mortal Storm" was a very polite and reticent Jimmy Stewart movie made in 1940, under Hollywood's strict Production Code, while the Holocaust was happening. It is a film so careful the word "Jew" is never used. Even so, a "Mortal Storm" scene of Jimmy Stewart responding uncomfortably to a Nazi song sung in a restaurant gave me chills and will remain in my memory for a long time.

As published reviews show, one of the most shocking segments of "Imaginary Witness" reports on the passivity of Hollywood moguls in response to the rise of Nazism. The moguls themselves, including Louis B. Mayer, Samuel Goldwyn, The Warner Brothers, and Carl Laemmle, were largely Central and Eastern European Jews. Reviewer Nancy deWolf Smith wrote in the April 1, 2005 Wall Street Journal, "Perhaps nothing, including powerful movies, could have generated the force necessary to get rid of Hitler in time to save his victims. What's sickening to contemplate is that Hollywood, and by extension society at large, didn't even try."

"Imaginary Witness" reports that "From the moment Hitler became chancellor in 1933, Hollywood treated Nazism with kid gloves… Even the newsreels, produced and distributed by the major studios, ignored the implicit threat in Nazi propaganda, often recycling it uncritically for the American audience." A newsreel treated a Nazi book burning as if it were a high-spirited teen prank: "It's a big night for the younger Hitler set," the newsreel narrator reports.

Hollywood, like the rest of America, was slow to wake up to even the most detailed, first-hand accounts of the Final Solution. As "Imaginary Witness" puts it: "Hollywood's vision of Germany was marked by an innocence that was in stark contrast to a growing body of information about the war." Director Vincent Sherman said, "We heard about concentration camps. And we thought, as the Germans said, that they were just a place that kept people. Nothing was ever mentioned about the ovens. Nothing was mentioned about the horrors that took place in the concentration camp." In a scene from 1942's "To Be or Not to Be," a notorious comedy about the Nazi occupation of Poland directed by Ernst Lubitsch and starring Jack Benny, star Carole Lombard appears in a sleeveless lame evening gown; she plans to wear the dress in a concentration camp. "Hitler's Madmen" included a cheap, titillating scene of a Nazi officer, John Carradine, ogling a lineup of sexy young women. "The Ducktators" was a comedy cartoon.

As powerful as the masters of Hollywood were, they feared retaliation from anti-Semitic Americans if they spoke out, and from Germany, as well. They relied on international audiences for profits. Germany provided ten percent of their overseas market. When Nazi Germany demanded that studios fire Jewish workers in Germany, nearly all the studios complied.

It's clear that Hollywood's early failure to respond in full to the rise of Nazism is worthy of its own documentary dedicated to the topic, rather than the preliminary view "Imaginary Witness" can provide. There is already an excellent documentary on the wider American failure to respond adequately to Hitler's rise: PBS' 1994 "America and the Holocaust: Deceit and Indifference."

"Imaginary Witness" praises Harry Warner, of Warner Brothers, for showing the courage and determination to speak up. In 1939, after the 1938 arrest of Nazi spies in the US, Warner Brothers made "Confessions of a Nazi Spy." The entire production was under wraps. It was code-named "Confessions of Nancy Drew." More than half of the cast requested that their names not appear in the credits. The part of Adolph Hitler was dropped when Warners could not find a single actor willing to play the role. The film came under attack. A propaganda leaflet, published in America, by Americans, identified everyone involved in the film as Jewish. The film was banned in almost every European country.

In 1940, MGM made "The Mortal Storm," the story of a Jewish family during Nazism's rise. The word "Jew" is never used in the film. Rather, the word "non-Aryan" is used. Even under this self-censorship, the clips from "The Mortal Storm" shown in "Imaginary Witness" are disturbing. Jimmy Stewart, Margaret Sullavan, and Robert Young are seated at a crowded restaurant when Dan Dailey enters and urges diners to rise and sing a Nazi song. Stewart is hesitant to do so. It's a powerful scene. A representative of the German consulate said that those involved in "The Mortal Storm" would be remembered after a German victory in the war. It was rumored that Goebbels called Louis B Mayer to complain. Germany soon banned the distribution of all MGM films.

The most notable anti-Nazi film made before America entered the war was not produced by a Hollywood studio, or by a Jew. 1940's "The Great Dictator" was produced, directed, financed by and starred Charlie Chaplin. Director Sidney Lumet, who saw the film when it premiered, said that when Chaplin used the word "Jew" "You realized you had almost never heard the word 'Jew' in a movie." "The Great Dictator" was a comedy; its criticism is light-hearted. In a famous scene, Chaplin, imitating Hitler, dances with a globe while fantasizing world domination.

Politicians in Washington were alarmed at what they saw as Hollywood's war-mongering. Joseph Kennedy flew to Hollywood to convene a meeting of the heads of the studios. A paraphrase of Kennedy's message: "I warn you: do not press for American involvement in this conflict. Because this will be seen as your war." That had a very chilling effect on the Jews of Hollywood, film scholar Neal Gabler remarks. Kennedy comes across as the heavy; this viewer wondered what FDR was doing while Hollywood's Jews were being scapegoated.

Even non-Jewish Chaplin's innocuous film inflamed Hollywood's critics. The US senate formed the Nye-Clark Committee to investigate charges that Hollywood was encouraging anti-German bias. The committee cited "The Great Dictator" and "Confessions of a Nazi Spy" as evidence of a Jewish conspiracy in Hollywood to propel the US into war. Senator Gerald Nye of North Dakota declared in a nationwide radio address that it was Jews, not Hitler, who posed the greatest threat to America.

My own book, "Bieganski" argues that one use of the Brute Polak stereotype is to exculpate those, including anti-Semitic Americans and American Jews, who could have done more in response to the rise of Nazism, but did not. "Imaginary Witness" supports that argument in several respects. Hitler made his intentions clear. The world did not react as it should have: with unambiguous condemnation and a promise of firm response. The United States did not react as it should have at least partly because many in the US shared the Nazi worldview to some degree; in fact Scientific Racism, a response to immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe to the US, was an American export to Germany. "Imaginary Witness" includes footage of some of the ten thousand German-Americans who joined The Bund, a pro-Nazi group. As the documentary makes clear, anti-Semitism was widespread and socially acceptable. Mississippi Congressman John Rankin publicly used words like "kike." American anti-Semites referred to the "unchristian Jews" who controlled Hollywood.

Viewers can feel compassion for the moguls' plight, while also feeling disappointed that they did not do more. I was reminded of a passage by Romanian-born Auschwitz survivor Elie Wiesel:

"While Mordecai Anielewicz and his comrades fought their lonely battle in the blazing ghetto under siege … a large New York synagogue invited its members to a banquet featuring a well-known comedian … The factories of Treblinka, Belzec, Maidanek and Auschwitz were operating at top capacity, while on the other side, Jewish social and intellectual life was flourishing, Jewish leaders met, threw up their arms in gestures of helplessness, shed a pious tear or two and went on with their lives: speeches, travels, quarrels, banquets, toasts, honors … If our brothers had shown more compassion, more initiative, more daring … if a million Jews had demonstrated in front of the White house … if Jewish notables had started a hunger strike … who knows, the enemy might have desisted."

The point is not that Hollywood's Jewish moguls could or should have stopped Hitler and rescued six million Jews, not to mention the tens of millions of others who died during World War Two. The point is, rather, that the Holocaust burdens the world with overwhelming pain, guilt, and regret – all of which seek a target – an isolated scapegoat we can blame so that we can carry on feeling good about ourselves. The point is that speakers who resort to the Brute Polak stereotype use two different rhetorical strategies. When Poles are discussed, rhetoric acts as a prosecuting attorney. When Americans and American Jews are discussed in products like "Imaginary Witness," rhetoric becomes a defense attorney.

Scholar Lawrence Baron published a review of "Imaginary Witness" in the May, 2005 issue of "Film and History." In spite of its careful and sympathetic depiction of the moguls, Baron is very tough on "Imaginary Witness." Baron goes to greater extent than the documentary does to defend the moguls and justify their actions. His defenses, and others like them, are sound. "Congress would regulate the film industry," Baron reports, if the moguls had risked speaking out. True enough. Poles who helped Jews risked, not Congressional regulation, but murder of their entire families by Nazis. One might ask why the moguls should even have bothered to speak out. An anti-Semitic America might respond with hostility or indifference. The Polish Underground Home Army sent Jan Karski, at great risk to himself, into a concentration camp and the Warsaw Ghetto and then to Washington to deliver first-hand reports of the Final Solution to Roosevelt. Roosevelt did not respond with stepped-up action to stop the Holocaust. Again, how we tell the Holocaust story matters, including in a documentary dedicated to analyzing how the Holocaust story has been told, and in published responses to it.

On December 7, 1941, Japan bombed Pearl Harbor. Washington previously criticized Hollywood for alleged war-mongering. Now Washington demanded that Hollywood make films that would promote war. Even so, only few and minor films focused on Nazi atrocities. A few B movies without big stars or budgets, that were rarely sold overseas, and that fell beneath the censors' notice, offered a more serious look at Nazism. A scene from the 1944 Warners' B film, "None Shall Escape," shows Nazis massacring Jews.

"Imaginary Witness" argues that America knew, early and in detail, about the Holocaust but chose not to act on it directly. It features Holocaust survivor and film producer Branko Lustig stating, "We were sitting in the concentration camp in Auschwitz and American planes were flying over our head. If American planes would put only one bomb on the railway station before Auschwitz the four hundred thousand Jews who came at the last moment from Hungary would not be killed."

Within weeks of the victory in Europe, twelve Hollywood moguls, at the invitation of General Eisenhower, flew to Europe to see for themselves the horror of the camps. "Imaginary Witness" includes footage of their arrival. They are all wearing American military uniforms. The moguls made public declarations of their intentions to incorporate Nazi atrocities into films. Jack Warner said, "No one connected with motion pictures who has seen these things can allow themselves to assume responsibility for a screen which portrays only a make-believe world."

One newsreel opens with words one would not see today: "German Atrocities." Germans have been rehabilitated. Any such film today would not open with the words "German Atrocities," but, rather, "Nazi Atrocities," or, simply, "Atrocities." The Film Daily reported record-breaking audiences for these newsreels. "Imaginary Witness" reports that after this initial saturation viewing, the concentration camp footage was put away, not to be seen again for several years; it would take decades, the documentary claims, before Hollywood would tell the Holocaust story in full. "Maybe," screenwriter Norma Barzman conjectures," "audiences didn't want to be reminded of their own anti-Semitism and racism. Maybe people don't go to movies to feel awful about themselves." Lawrence Baron, in his critical review, questions this, citing some films that made use of concentration camp footage. The films Baron mentions were not major productions.

Mainstream Hollywood's immediate response to the Holocaust included two 1947 films that never mentioned the Nazis or the murder of European Jews: "Crossfire" and "Gentleman's Agreement." Perhaps it was too soon after the war for Hollywood to produce a coherent response. Perhaps the events had not quite sunk in, guesses author Thane Rosenbaum.

"Imaginary Witness" again supports arguments in "Bieganski." Germany was important to America in a way that other countries were not. Neal Gabler states, "There was another factor here. The United States very rapidly wanted to rehabilitate Germany. We wanted to create a democracy there that would be hospitable to American ideas, American values, American goods. The last thing America wanted to do was to make films that would alienate a group of people that America was trying to woo." And, as in the pre-war era when it was important not to criticize the rise of Nazism too overtly, Americans who claimed German descent were the largest subset of the American ethnic mix. Titles like "German Atrocities" were put away, not to be seen again. "Imaginary Witness" does not mention, but should have, "Decision before Dawn," a 1951 Hollywood production that exculpates, not just Germany, but Nazi Germany. Hollywood went overboard to help America bring Germany back into its embrace.

Concentration camp survivors did not speak about their experiences. Robert Clary is familiar to Baby Boomer television audiences; he played LeBeau in the 1960s sitcom, "Hogan's Heroes." Clary was a French-Jewish concentration camp survivor. "I spent thirty-one months in four different camps. I never wanted to talk about it." Branko Lustig says, "A lot of people were ashamed. I never told my story to anybody." This silence was reflected in films. In "The Search" a child survivor won't speak; in "Singing in the Dark" a survivor has amnesia.

The single weirdest clip in "Imaginary Witness" is of an episode of the TV reality show, "This Is Your Life." In this normally chipper, upbeat program, guests are treated to a televised summary of the highlights of their lives. In a May 27, 1953 episode, the guest was Hanna Block Kohner, an extraordinarily beautiful Holocaust survivor. It's squirm-inducing to hear Ralph Edwards, the golden-voiced TV host recount to Hanna, as the camera focuses in tightly on her anguished face, the details of the loss of her family to Zyklon B, and to watch her on-camera reunion with a pal from Auschwitz and her brother from Israel. On the other hand, it is undeniable that this episode forced audiences to confront the reality of the Holocaust.

"Imaginary Witness" touches briefly on the 1947 HUAC hearings on communism in Hollywood. Screenwriter Norma Barzman says that the HUAC hearings were interpreted as a sign of the rise of fascism in the US. This fear, "Imaginary Witness" reports, caused Jews in Hollywood to further shy away from making films with Jewish themes.

In 1959, though, Hollywood made "The Diary of Anne Frank." "They tried to make Anne Frank more universal and less Jewish so that it would be more appealing to an American audience," reports film scholar Michael Berenbaum. Director George Stevens had been in the Army Signal Corps. He filmed in Dachau. He certainly felt a call to make films that would honor what he'd witnessed. Stevens also cited this call when making his 1965 all-star Biblical epic, "The Greatest Story Ever Told." "The Diary of Anne Frank," Stevens assured audiences, would be "devoid of Nazi horrors." It includes Frank's famous line, "I still believe in spite of everything that people are really good at heart," but it does not include scenes of Anne's death in Bergen-Belsen.

On April 16, 1959, television's Playhouse 90 aired Abby Mann's "Judgment at Nuremberg" dramatizing the American trial of Nazi war criminals. Mann himself identifies the antagonist of his play, not as Nazism, but as "patriotism." The documentary does not mention this, but Mann was one of many who would use the Nazis, the ultimate evil, as metaphor to attack another target – in his case, patriotism. A more recent example of this unfortunate trend would be singer Hank Williams Jr., who, in October, 2011, in a televised interview, compared Barack Obama to Hitler. Williams then lost his job on the television program, Monday Night Football, and his song, "Are You Ready for some Football," was dropped from the program as well. Polemicists have used Nazism to criticize Western Civilization, Christianity, Poland, Feminism, environmentalism, abortion, stem cell research – almost everything except Nazi Germany itself. This exploitation of Nazism to criticize one's chosen target is so ubiquitous it is satirized in Godwin's Law. Film scholar Michael Berenbaum expresses the appeal of Nazism, "It's absolute evil. Part of its attraction to filmmakers and to audiences is that you are touching the absolute."

In the 1959 television broadcast of "Judgment at Nuremberg," the extraordinarily handsome German actor, Maximilian Schell, asks questions that help to remove guilt from Germany and locate it in the entire world that watched Hitler's rise without doing enough to stop it. "What about the rest of the world, your honor?" Schell asks, rhetorically. "Did it not know the intentions of the Third Reich? Did it not read his intentions in Mein Kampf? Published in every corner of the world?"

Playhouse 90's sponsor was the American Gas Company and the Magic Chef gas range whose slogan was, "Americans are cooking with gas." In a very dramatic scene, Claude Reins is shown obviously mouthing the words "gas chambers" but the sound is deleted.

In 1961, "Judgment at Nuremberg" was made into a feature film, and concentration camp footage was shown within the movie. That same year Adolf Eichmann's trial was broadcast on TV. Interestingly, clips are shown in which Jewish, Israeli victims of the European Holocaust are shown testifying in English. This may reflect a conscious desire to reach the widest audience possible.

Two Holocaust-related films were released in 1965 "The Pawnbroker" and "Ship of Fools." Though "Imaginary Witness" does not bring this up, the clips shown from both could be interpreted as, almost certainly inadvertently, blaming the victim. In "The Pawnbroker," an old man castigates Rod Steiger, playing a Holocaust survivor and pawnbroker: "You breathe; you eat; you walk; you take a dream and give a dollar. What survival? No passion. No pity. The walking dead." Like Abby Mann, "The Pawnbroker" uses Nazism to attack its own chosen target, poor living conditions for African Americans in Harlem. In "Ship of Fools" a friend warns a wealthy German Jew about the rise of Hitler. His chuckling reply, "The German Jew is something special. We are Germans first and Jews second. We have done so much for Germany. Germany has done so much for us. A little patience. A little good will. It works itself out. Listen, there are nearly a million Jews in Germany. What are they going to do? Kill all of us?" The viewer might be tempted to blame this naïve German Jew for his own fate. Again, the Holocaust story is so horrific that those who hear it or tell it are constantly looking, consciously or

unconsciously, for a scapegoat to carry the horror in order that the hearer may be redeemed.

A handful of Holocaust-related films from the late sixties and early seventies are mentioned: "The Producers," a comedy, "Harold and Maude," "which," as "Imaginary Witness" comments, "uses brief holocaust imagery to imply a back story that need not be embellished," and "Cabaret" which used the Holocaust to serve as a metaphor for something else, according to the documentary. Baron strongly criticized that last point, arguing that "Cabaret" is no metaphorical treatment of Vietnam, but a worthy depiction of the rise of Nazism, especially in its undeniably excellent beer garden scene.

The 1977 television broadcast of "Roots" was the catalyst for a turning point in film depictions of the Holocaust. "Roots" was very ethnic, and it treated unpleasant subjects, and it scored very high ratings. The week it aired, producers gave the television miniseries "The Holocaust" the green light.

Broadcast over four consecutive nights in 1978, the miniseries tells the story of the Holocaust from the point of view of the assimilated German Jewish Weiss family. They were meant to personify something that was very much part of the American experience: people who came from somewhere else and became assimilated into the culture. Berenbaum says that they were "One family that seemed to have been everywhere and done everything. That's the magic of Hollywood, not the abstract, the concrete." Ratings were high. In NYC, during commercial breaks, the water pressure went down.

In the New York Times, Elie Wiesel published "Trivializing of the Holocaust." Wiesel calls the miniseries "morally objectionable" and "indecent." Thane Rosenbaum says, "The idea that we can recreate the event with props and set pieces and makeup is in many ways a desecration… We dominate world culture. We have to be careful of Holocaust films because they can be diluting or trivializing or distorting or simply false." Neal Gabler says, "Almost everyone had operated under the assumption that just dealing with the Holocaust is good. You are bearing witness. Wiesel says that any representation trivializes the event. This is something that is beyond any kind of traditional narrative form. What you are getting is a war between narrative on one hand and history on the other." A poster at the International Movie Database offered an interesting take on the question of whether it is morally objectionable or trivializing to dramatize the Holocaust on film. What about the destruction of the Native Americans, so often, and so inaccurately, depicted in Western films, he asks. His point, of course, is that a double standard is applied by some critics: other people's atrocities and genocides are okay to put on film, even in a grievously distorted fashion, but, for some critics, the Holocaust is not.

Theorists might debate the propriety of the depiction, but it is undeniable that "The Holocaust" miniseries had impacts that many might assess as positive. Scholar Sharon Rivo says that, "I watched teenagers watch that program, and it had an enormous effect upon them." In Germany, Chancellor Helmudt Schmidt watched it. As a direct result of the miniseries, the German legislature extended the statute of limitations on Nazi war criminals. The United States Holocaust Memorial Commission was set up. Survivors now began to tell their stories on film. A clip is shown from "Kitty: Return to Auschwitz." Robert Clary reports that he began to speak publicly. "Imaginary Witness" implies that a television miniseries, attacked by purists for desecrating the Holocaust, actually helped to make possible the telling – and the hearing – of the Holocaust story, more than a generation after it ended.

The Holocaust film to which all others are compared, of course, is Steven Spielberg's 1993, multiple Academy-Award-winning "Schindler's List." "Imaginary Witness" does not probe deeply into that film's central irony: the most significant Holocaust film to date stars a non-Jew, Liam Neeson, playing a handsome, heroic and sympathetic German Nazi Party member. As many previous commentators have pointed out, it had to be that way. It didn't have to be that way for reasons of representational truth. Your average Nazi party member was not Oskar Schindler. Your average rescuer of Jews was not Oskar Schindler. Yad Vashem records more Poles as rescuers of Jews than members of any other nation. But the most significant Holocaust film to date would not be about a Polish peasant who rescued Jews. Polish peasants are poor, dirty, relatively disempowered laborers, and few would want to look at them onscreen for a couple of hours. It would not focus on Raoul Wallenberg. Schindler was a German Nazi; Wallenberg was a Swedish Christian. Schindler went to Nazi-occupied Poland to make money and to party; Wallenberg volunteered to go to Nazi-occupied Budapest to rescue Jews. He knew he was risking death by doing so. Schindler saved over a thousand Jews; Wallenberg saved magnitudes more. Schindler was alive at the end of World War Two. He won. Wallenberg, whose exact fate remains unknown, probably died horribly in Soviet captivity. Few would go to see that movie, the one that ends with the obscure, tragic murder – at the hands of America's Soviet allies – of a noble hero.

Audiences would not choose to identify with typical Jewish Holocaust victims, who had been, because of no crime of their own, unjustly targeted, terrorized, humiliated, tortured, and mass murdered. Few people would ever purchase a ticket to that movie, a movie that ended as the Holocaust ended for its typical victim: with unredeemed, diabolical mass murders committed by fully empowered perpetrators, all too many of whom managed to escape any justice. A film that attempted to depict some of those horrors, Tim Blake Nelson's 2001 "The Grey Zone," has been little seen or honored.

No. "Schindler's List" was not made for reasons of representational truth. "Schindler's List" was made in obedience to the demands of narrative. Audiences want to look at tall, powerful, handsome, well-dressed characters. Audiences want to look at men who charm and seduce women and enjoy life's blessings. Audiences want stories to end in triumph. The handsome, well-dressed, powerful people, the men enjoying parties and girls and champagne, in Nazi-occupied, Holocaust-era Poland were all on the very wrong side, and so to give audiences what they want, a Nazi party member had to be the protagonist of the most significant Holocaust film yet made. The most successful Hollywood director in history is a slave to narrative rules, no less than the rest of us who attempt, in our own fumbling ways, to tell our own stories to our own small audiences. Again, that is why you can't understand the Holocaust story unless you understand story itself, its demands, gifts, and limitations.

And, of course, in "Schindler's List," Nazis are not the sole antagonists. There are other bad guys: vicious women who haul off and fling large fistfuls of mud at helpless Jews being driven out by Nazis, moppets who wait beside trains going to death camps in order to make slicing movements across their little throats and to terrorize Jews further, and elegantly dressed women who mince about Krakow's thoroughfares unimpeded, not realizing that the ash falling on their furs is from cremated Jewish bodies. All of these clips from "Schindler's List" are shown in "Imaginary Witness." In these clips from the most significant Holocaust film ever made, the antagonists are all Poles. Are these typical Poles? Is Hollywood telling the Holocaust story accurately here? My own book, "Bieganski," argues that it is not – and that it is not doing so for narrative reasons.

I was in Krakow this summer; indeed, I was in Oskar Schindler's former factory in Krakow, now a museum. I spent several hours in the "Krakow Under Nazi Occupation 1939-1945" exhibit. The museum does record the anti-Semitism expressed by a poisonous and deadly minority of Poles. Unlike "Schindler's List," that is hardly the only Polish story the museum tells.

In fact the Nazis had genocidal designs on Poles – and this complicates the Holocaust story. Their designs were made clear in the opening days of the occupation of Krakow, when Jagiellonian University professors were sent to concentration camps. Some argue that Polish culture is fundamentally anti-Semitic. A casual viewer could certainly gather that from "Schindler's List." That the Nazis themselves did not assess Polish culture so is evident from their actions in Krakow. There they destroyed landmarks of Polish culture. The Nazis destroyed Krakow's monument to Adam Mickiewicz, Poland's national poet. Mickiewicz is said to have been of partially Jewish ancestry. He was a proud son of a multicultural Poland, celebrating both Lithuania and Poland, and he celebrated Jews' contributions to Poland in numerous ways, including his depiction of Jankiel, a key character in the national epic poem. The Nazis destroyed Krakow's monument to the Battle of Grunwald, the largest battle in medieval Europe, in which pagan Lithuanians and Catholic Poles defeated genocidal Teutonic Knights who practiced conversion by the sword. The Nazis planned to destroy Krakow's monuments to Tadeusz Kosciuszko, who approached Poland's Jews with respect, and Josef Pilsudski, who was much loved by Jews for his dedication to a multicultural Poland. None of this Nazi cultural genocide in Krakow, of course, in mentioned in "Schindler's List" or any other Hollywood treatment of the Holocaust, though Polish anti-Semitism is now a frequent theme in Hollywood and TV productions.

"Cabaret" includes an unforgettable scene. This scene tells the viewer all he needs to know about the benefits, and failings, of tight focus. A beautiful, young, blond boy is shown in tight focus. You certainly see every detail of his face. He is singing a song. The song is rousing and uplifting. The camera pulls back. You see the boy's clothes: a Nazi uniform. You hear more of the song's lyrics. The scene becomes terrifying.

"Imaginary Witness" maintains a tight focus. It focuses on Jewish victims. That is a good thing. We need to know that story. But it never pulls back. It never mentions that the first and last group the Nazis mass murdered were handicapped people. It never mentions that the first to die from Zyklon B were Soviet POWs. It never mentions the Nazis' plans re: Poles or Poland. This tight focus itself distorts history. A mere mention of Hitler's other victims would have been enough to provide context, both in this documentary and in films like "Schindler's List."

In "Bieganski" I quote two memoirists and children of survivors: Julie Salomon and Anne Karpf. Salamon pointed out that Steven Spielberg, maker of Schindler's List, has never made a film about American anti-Semitism. Indeed, Spielberg, a Hollywood mogul himself, has never made a film about Hollywood moguls who dropped the ball before and during World War Two. Karpf pointed out that Claude Lanzmann, director of Shoah, though himself "A French Jew, remained silent on the wartime fate of Jews from France: though one of the film's dominant languages is French, Lanzmann nowhere brings in French witnesses to talk about the events on his doorstep." There are reasons these two powerful filmmakers made these choices. Narrative reasons. "Imaginary Witness" is an excellent primer addressing the narrative pressures faced by the world's most powerful storytellers in telling one of the world's most important stories.

_________________________

Danusha Goska teaches at William Paterson University. Her book Bieganski: The Brute Polak Stereotype in Polish-Jewish Relations and American Popular Culture (Academic Studies Press, 2010) is available from Amazon. She blogs about anti-Polish stereotypes at Bieganski the Blog.

Two Lives Shaped by World War Two: A Video

2011-10-25T03:25:00.000-07:00

Recently, I was invited to do a poetry reading at St. Francis College, Brooklyn, New York. The reading, titled "Two Lives Shaped by World War Two," focused on my parents and their experiences as Polish slave laborers in Nazi Germany.

Here's a video of the poetry reading. It's about an hour long, 40 minutes of poems and then some time for questions.

The reading, organized by Gregory Tague of Editions Bibliotekos and sponsored by St. Francis College, was written up for the college site. The piece contains some background information about my mom and dad and a couple of photos of me. Please stop by and take a look.

Two Lives Shaped by World War Two: A Reading

2011-10-03T07:50:00.000-07:00

LIGHTNING and ASHES:

Two Lives Shaped by World War II

->Reading, Book Signing, Discussion<-

Born in a refugee camp after World War II, John Guzlowski came with his family to the United States as a Displaced Person in 1951. His parents had been slave laborers in Nazi Germany. Growing up in the immigrant and refugee neighborhoods around Humboldt Park in Chicago, he met hardware store clerks with Auschwitz tattoos on their wrists, Polish cavalry officers who still mourned for their dead comrades, and women who had walked from Siberia to Iran to escape the Russians. His poetry, fiction, and essays try to remember them and their voices.

11 October 2011 – St. Francis College

Founders Hall Theater / Callahan Center

180 Remsen St., Brooklyn Heights

4:00pm – 6:00pm

- Free and Open to the Public – Refreshments -

John Z. Guzlowski is retired from Eastern Illinois University, where he taught contemporary American literature and poetry writing. In his books Lightning and Ashes, Third Winter of War: Buchenwald, and Language of Mules and Other Poems, he writes about his parents' experiences in German Concentration Camps. In 2001 he won the Illinois Arts Council Fellowship Award, and his poems have been nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize. He has also published extensively on contemporary American fiction in journals such as Shofar, Modern Fiction Studies, Polish Review, Critique, Polish American Studies, Studies in Jewish American Literature, and Ascent.

♦ The reading is presented by Editions Bibliotekos and sponsored by the English Department of St. Francis College. John’s reading and discussion will be the third such event initiated by Bibliotekos and hosted by St. Francis College.

9/11 -- Ten Years Later

2011-09-08T17:50:00.000-07:00

One of the things that the past teaches us is that there is really no end to the past. I saw this in my parents. For them World War II never ended -- even after liberation, even after forty, even after fifty years. The war and the camps my parents suffered in were always there. A snowy day in November would put my mom back in the frozen beet fields that the German guards forced her to work in that first winter in Germany. A TV show as harmless as Hogan's Heroes would leave my father shaking.

I've seen this in other survivors and veterans, and I'm sure you have too.

What the war taught them was that war has no beginning and no end.

It's the same for a lot of us with 9/11. We want it to have an end. We want what people call closure. We want to get beyond what happened.

We've been fighting the War on Terrorism for 10 years in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Islamic world is changing rapidly where ever we look, and we've killed Osama bin Laden. So why does 9/11 still feel like it happened yesterday? Why does a film clip of a plane crashing into one of the Twin Towers stop us? Why does a voice recording of a stewardess on that plane talking to ground control about not being able to open the door to the cockpit bring us to tears?

We want an end, and we've wanted it for ten years, and it hasn't happened, and it never will. That's one of the things that 9/11 has taught us.

I've written a number of poems about 9/11 over the years. The first one was written a couple days of 9/11. That poem talked about how I wanted an end to 9/11. It didn't happen then, and it hasn't happened since.

Here it is:

Sept 13, 2001

I want to come home

and turn on the evening news

and not see bin Laden,

his terrible lightning

piercing the sky

and showering clouds

of metal down on the streets

I want to say to my wife,

Linda, do you think

it will rain tomorrow?

If it doesn’t, maybe we can

plant those mums in the garden

to replace the verbena

that have been struggling

all summer with the heat,

the sun drying them

to brown slivers, nothing

red or green about them

And I want her to say,

if it rains let’s go to the bookstore

and have a cup of Starbucks

and read some travel books

and talk about where we’ll go

when Lillian comes home

during Christmas break

She’ll need something

to take her mind off

her first year of law school

________________________

I've posted three other times about 9/11.

The first post was a letter I wrote shortly after 9/11. It's called "The Short View and the 9/11 Terrorist Attacks."

The second was an update to that post -- talking about what 9/11 looked like in 2007.

The last was about an anthology of poems on how we look at God since 9/11.

John Guzlowski: Radio Interview

2011-08-09T07:36:00.000-07:00

Lois P. Jones will be interviewing me Wednesday, August 10 at 830 PM PST on her program The Poets Cafe (KPFK Radio - Los Angeles 90.7 fm.)

Here's a piece of the blurb she wrote for the program:

One of my most profoundly moving interviews, please tune in to Poets Cafe with guest John Guzlowski who reads from Lightning and Ashes and Language of Mules. Works detailing his parents' experiences as Polish slave laborers in Nazi Germany.

His mother Tekla Hanczarek came from a small community west of Lviv in what was then Poland where her father was a forest warden. His father Jan was born in a farming community north of Poznań. John was born Zbigniew Guzlowski in a Displaced Persons camp in Vienenburg, Germany in 1948, and changed his name to John when he was naturalized as an American citizen.

Guzlowski writes "to remember his parents and their voices."

_____________

There will be a temporary link to the show which stays on line for a few weeks at www.KPFK.org and then later, a permanent archive will be created at

http://www.timothy-green.org/blog/poetscafe/

Free Documentaries about the Nazis and World War II

2011-08-02T14:15:00.000-07:00

Some of the best recent documentaries about the Nazis, their motivation, and the suffering they imposed are available for free from youtube.com. (The only down-side is that the documentaries are broken into segments that tend to be about 10 minutes long.) I would be happy to add other documentaries to this list. Just let me know what's available for free online.

I highly recommend the following:

The Nazis: A Warning From History BBC, part 1 (many interviews with German soldiers, politicians, and civilians about their attitudes toward the Nazis)

Auschwitz: The Nazis and the Final Solution BBC, part 1
(very well produced, includes re-enactments of key moments and interviews with former SS men who served at Auschwitz)

The Third Reich, part 1, from the History Channel (relies heavily on personal films and photographs)

The World at War: Inside the Third Reich, part 1 (Older BBC series, still compelling)

The Warsaw Uprising, August 1, 1944

2011-07-31T10:31:00.000-07:00

On August 1, 1944, the Polish resistance and the people of Warsaw rose up to throw off the Nazi oppressors. The Poles fought with guns, bricks, stolen grenades, sticks, and their hands and teeth. The Nazis retaliated with tanks, bombers, and fire.

63 days later the last Poles surrendered to the Germans.

250,000 men, women, and children were killed in the fighting, and the city of Warsaw was leveled by the Germans.

As a boy growing up, I would often hear my father talk about the fight the Poles made in the face of German military superiority. He would talk and sometimes he would weep for the dead.

My father wasn't there, of course. He had been taken by the Germans to Buchenwald Concentration Camp several years before. But when he talked about the Warsaw Uprising, he spoke like a man who had been touched by something that he would never forget.

I tried to capture this in a poem called "Cross of Polish Wood."

A CROSS OF POLISH WOOD

Told to take nothing
he took the cross
his mother gave him
two clean planed strips
made one by four nails
and a figure in lead

But he didn't pray in the box cars
he whispered and listened to whispers
talk of Polish honor
and the strength of lances
of Anders and Sikorski
and someone always said
"Warsaw will never fall
Panzers are only made of steel"

The fall of Warsaw taught him to pray
sent him to his knees in Buchenwald
to the nails and the lead
and the clean-planed Polish wood

What My Father Ate: A Reading

2011-07-15T15:23:00.000-07:00

My father spent more than 4 years in Buchenwald Concentration Camp as a Polish slave laborer. He was captured in a round up when he went to his village north of Poznan to buy some rope. When he was taken by the Nazis, he was a kid, just 19 years old.

A lot of times when he talked about his experiences, he couldn't help telling me about how hungry he was for those four years. He said that most days he got about 500 calories of food. Once when he complained about the food, the Nazi guard hit him across the head with a club. From that day on, my dad was blind in one eye.

When the Americans liberated the camp, he weighed 75 pounds. He was one of the lucky ones. A lot of the guys in the camp didn't make it.

I've written a lot of poems about how hungry he was during those four year. The following is one of them. It's called "What He Ate." It appears in my book Lightning and Ashes. Here's a youtube of me reading the poem. I'm posting a copy of the poem itself after the video.

What My Father Ate

He ate what he couldn’t eat,
what his mother taught him not to:
brown grass, small chips of wood, the dirt
beneath his gray dark fingernails.

He ate the leaves off trees. He ate bark.
He ate the flies that tormented
the mules working in the fields.
He ate what would kill a man

in the normal course of his life:
leather buttons, cloth caps, anything
small enough to get into his mouth.
He ate roots. He ate newspaper.

In his slow clumsy hunger
he did what the birds did, picked
for oats or corn or any kind of seed
in the dry dung left by the cows.

And when there was nothing to eat
he’d search the ground for pebbles
and they would loosen his saliva
and he would swallow that.

And the other men did the same.

__________________________________

The photograph at the start is by Margaret Bourke-White, an American woman reporter and photographer, one of the first people in Buchenwald after the liberation. Her story and some of her photos appear in her memoir of being with the advancing Allied army, Dear Fatherland, Rest Quietly (1946). The book is out of print but some libraries may still have a copy. You won't regret tracking it down.

Beets: A Reading

2011-07-01T18:37:00.000-07:00

"Beets" is one of four poems I wrote after watching Schindler's List with my mother. She wasn't the kind of person to talk about what had happened to her in the war, the way the Nazis killed her mother and sister and her sister's baby, and the years my mom spent as a slave laborer. Most of the time when I asked her about her past, she would wave me away and tell me simply a piece of wisdom she learned in the camps: "If they give you bread, eat it. If they beat you, run away."

This changed after we watched Schindler's List together. She liked the movie, thought it was powerful, but finally judged it inadequate. She said that no film could ever capture the things that happened in the camps. After saying that, she started telling me a series of stories about her life in the war. The poem "Beets" is one of those stories.

____________________

"Beets" appears in my book Lightning and Ashes (available from Amazon and Steel Toe Books).

I posted another poem in this series about the stories my mom told about the slave labor camps earlier. It's called "What the War Taught Her" and you can see the reading by clicking here.

D-Day Remembrance

2011-06-06T10:42:00.000-07:00

Today, June 6, is the anniversary of the invasion of Europe, and by chance I was in a high school about to begin a presentation about my parents and their experiences in the Nazi concentration camps when an announcement came on asking the students in the school to remember the anniversary of D-Day.

As the speaker talked about what D-Day was, I thought about all that day meant to me, my parents' long years as Polish forced laborers in Nazi Germany, the refugee camps after the war, the family killed and left behind, our coming to the US as DPs.

When the announcement ended, I began my presentation with a poem about my father's liberation from the camps. Here's the poem:

In the Spring the War Ended

For a long time the war was not in the camps.
My father worked in the fields and listened
to the wind moving the grain, or a guard
shouting a command far off, or a man dying.

But in the fall, my father heard the rumbling
whisper of American planes, so high, like
angels, cutting through the sky, a thunder
even God in Heaven would have to listen to.

At last, one day he knew the war was there.
In the door of the barracks stood a soldier,
an American, short like a boy and frightened,
and my father marveled at the miracle of his youth

and took his hands and embraced him and told him
he loved him and his mother and father,
and he would pray for all his children
and even forgive him the sin of taking so long.

_______________________________

The poem appears in my book Lightning and Ashes, about my parents' experiences during the war and afterward.

My daughter Lillian sent me the following link to color photos from before and after D-Day from Life Magazine. The photos are amazing, and a large part of that amazement comes from the color. The color gives me a shock, a good one--it takes away the distance, makes the photos and the people and places in them immediate in a profound way.

Here's the link: Life.

What the War Taught My Mother

2011-05-25T11:36:00.000-07:00

This is a reading of "What the War Taught Her," a poem about my mother's experiences in the slave labor camps of Nazi Germany. She spent 2 and a half years in those camps. The poem appeared in my book about my parents, Lightning and Ashes.

The reading is one of a series posted by Henryk Gajewski. To see more of the readings, click here.

_______________________________

The Gajewski site also contains videos of Polish American writers Cecilia Woloch, Linda Nemec Foster, Mark Pawlak, Leonard Kress, and Phil Boiarski.

Warsaw Rising--An Award Winning Video

2011-05-24T07:11:00.001-07:00

The Warsaw Uprising began on August 1, 1944, and lasted for 63 days. When the fighting stopped. The city was in ruins. A quarter of a million Poles were dead, and the city's population of 1.3 million had been reduced to less than a 1000.

The following is a film commissioned by Museum of the Warsaw Rising of 1944.

________________

Polish filmmaker Michael Adamski has posted a series of videos on youtube regarding what Warsaw was like at the end of the war and what it's like now.

Part 1

Part 1 Continued

Part 2

Part 2 Continued

Adolf Hitler's Suicide Day, April 30: A Poem

2011-04-26T16:19:00.000-07:00

66 years ago today, Adolf Hitler committed suicide. Some historians say he killed himself with a cyanide capsule, others say he shot himself first.

My mother didn't know how he killed himself, and she didn't much care. She was happy that he did it.

She had never met him, but she had felt his fist across her face, his whip across her back. She was taken to Germany as a slave laborer after watching her mother, her sister Genja, and Genja's baby daughter murdered. My mom's sister Sophie was raped too. My mom escaped by jumping through the window and escaping into a forest. The Nazis caught her pretty soon after that.

My mother didn't talk much about what happened to her and her family. When I was a kid, I thought her silence came from annoyance with my questions about the war. Later, I realized that she didn't talk about her experiences because she wanted to protect me from the terrible things that happened, even though I was a grown man and a teacher.

Here's a poem I wrote about what Hitler did to my mom and her family.

My Mother was 19

Soldiers from nowhere
came to my mom’s farm
killed her sister Genja’s baby
with their heels
shot her momma too

One time in the neck
then for kicks in the face
lots of times

They saw my Aunt Sophie
they didn’t care
she was a virgin
dressed in a blue dress
with tiny white flowers

They raped her
so she couldn’t stand up
couldn’t lie down
couldn’t talk

They broke her teeth
when they shoved
the blue dress
in her mouth

If they had a camera
they would’ve taken her picture
and sent it to her

That’s the kind they were

Let me tell you:
God doesn’t give
you any favors

He doesn’t say
now you’ve seen
this bad thing
and tomorrow you’ll see
this good thing
and when you see it
you’ll be smiling

That’s bullshit

__________________

The poem first appeared in the Chattahoochee Review.

The photo was taken by my wife Linda in 1979 or so. From left to right in the back row, it's my dad, my mom, my sister Donnna, her daughter Denise, and me. In the front row are my sister's daughters Kathie and Cheryl.

To read other poems about my mom, check out The Guzlowski Sampler, a site set up at Eastern Illinois University, where I taught.

91 Essential Books about Poland and World War II

2011-03-02T07:22:00.000-08:00

The following list was compiled by William Szych and his friends at the the Facebook group "The Way Back -- Stories of Poland's Rape, Murder, Enslavement 70 Years Ago."

The introduction was written by Mr. Szych:

This living bibliography is dedicated to all in Poland who suffered so much during WWII...those who died, those who lived through untold horrors, those who lost their country and found refuge through out the free world, and those who fought so bravely within Poland and with the Allied forces to free Poland.

The books below (now over 80 in number) are linked to amazon or other sites where you can read reviews of the book. Remember you can usually request your local library to get books for you through regional book-lending agreements.

If you know of other books you think should be added, let us know.

"And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free." John 8:32

_____________________________

1. The Long Walk: The True Story of a Trek to Freedom [Paperback]

by Slavomir Rawicz

http://www.amazon.com/Long-Walk-True-Story-Freedom/dp/1558216847

(Note: It has been recommended that this book be removed from this list because of the controversy and allegations that this is not a true story. But that is exactly the whole point of this book list...to have people think about what happened in Poland...what is true, what is lie, what is omission.

What we know: Stalin's Gulags existed and Polish citizens were enslaved there and in the Siberian labor camps and collective farms. We know millions of Polish citizens perished both in Siberia and in occupied Poland (Jews and Christians) including the 1940 murder of 23,000 Polish officers on orders from Stalin, initially an ally of Hitler and fellow invader of Poland.

We also know that many Poles fought bravely in conventional land and air forces with the Allies in key battles of the war and in the underground resistance forces in Poland. We know that Polish children were stolen and sent to Germany never to see their familites again and we know that many women were raped by both Germans and Soviets. And we also know that at the end of the war, Poland was handed over to Stalin leaving many Polish people without a country.

The name of this Group includes "The Way Back" for reason. It is not just to acknowledge and commend the movie by that same name which depicts the brutality of the Soviet Gulag. It is, rather, to note that a long journey must begin to take the "way back" to the truth of what really happened to Poland just 70 years ago.

________________________________

2. When God Looked the Other Way: An Odyssey of War, Exile, and Redemption by Wesley Adamczyk (May 15, 2006)

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_i_0_29?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=when+god+looked+the+other+way&sprefix=when+god+looked+the+other+way

________________________________

3. Forgotten Holocaust: The Poles Under German Occupation 1939-1944 [Paperback] Richard C. Lukas (Author), Norman Davies (Foreword)

http://www.amazon.com/Forgotten-Holocaust-German-Occupation-1939-1944/dp/0781809010/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1294004995&sr=1-1-spell

________________________________

4. Katyn: Stalin's Massacre and the Triumph of Truth [Paperback] by Allen Paul

http://www.amazon.com/Katyn-Stalins-Massacre-Triumph-Truth/dp/0875806341/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpt_1

_________________________________

5. Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin by Timothy Snyder (Oct 12, 2010)

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_i_0_43?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=bloodlands+europe+between+hitler+and+stalin&sprefix=bloodlands+europe+between+hitler+and+stalin

________________________________

6. Waiting to be Heard: The Polish Christian Experience Under Nazi and Stalinist Oppression 1939-1955 [Paperback]Bogusia J. Wojciechowska

http://www.amazon.com/Waiting-Heard-Christian-Experience-Oppression/dp/1449013716/ref=pd_sim_b_3

___________________________________

7. Stolen Childhood: A Saga of Polish War Children [Paperback]

Robert Twele (Author), Lucjan Krolikowski (Author)

http://www.amazon.com/Stolen-Childhood-Saga-Polish-Children/dp/0595168639/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1294008458&sr=1-1

_________________________________

8. The Ice Road: An Epic Journey from the Stalinist Labor Camps to Freedom [Hardcover] Stefan Waydenfeld

http://www.amazon.com/Ice-Road-Journey-Stalinist-Freedom/dp/1607720027/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1294011337&sr=1-1

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-stefan-waydenfeld/the-ice-road-my-life-in-a_b_499248.html Article by the author.

_______________________________

9. The Mermaid and the Messerschmitt: War Through a Woman's Eyes 1939-1940 [Paperback] Rulka Langer (Author)

http://www.amazon.com/Mermaid-Messerschmitt-Through-Womans-1939-1940/dp/1607720019/ref=pd_bxgy_b_img_b

_________________________________

10. Quiet Hero: Secrets from My Father's Past [Hardcover] Rita Cosby

http://www.amazon.com/Quiet-Hero-Secrets-Fathers-Past/dp/1439165505/ref=pd_sim_b_4

________________________________

11. Code Name: Żegota: Rescuing Jews in Occupied Poland, 1942-1945: The Most Dangerous Conspiracy in Wartime Europe [Hardcover]

Irene Tomaszewski Tecia Werbowski (Authors)

http://www.amazon.com/Code-Name-1942-1945-Dangerous-Conspiracy/dp/031338391X#_

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13. The Officer's Daughter by Zina Rohan (FICTION--NOVEL)

http://www.amazon.com/Officers-Daughter-Zina-Rohan/dp/1846270677/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1263848626&sr=1-1

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14. 303 Squadron: The Legendary Battle of Britain Fighter Squadron

http://tinyurl.com/303Squadron

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15. A Long Long Time Ago and Essentially True by Brigid Pasulka

http://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.brigidpasulka.com%2F&h=fa9af

_________________________________

16. The Zookeeper's Wife: A War Story [Paperback]

by Diane Ackerman

http://www.amazon.com/Zookeepers-Wife-War-Story/dp/039333306X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1244671881&sr=1-1

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17. Inside a Gestapo Prison: The Letters of Krystyna Wituska, 1942-1944 [Paperback] Krystyna Wituska

(Author), Irene Tomaszewski (Author)

(note: she was executed by the Gestapo in her early twenties)

http://www.amazon.com/Inside-Gestapo-Prison-Krystyna-1942-1944/dp/0814332943/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1274233415&sr=1-1

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18. A Question of Honor: The Kosciuszko Squadron: Forgotten Heroes of World War II [Paperback] Lynne Olson and Stanley Cloud (Author)

http://www.amazon.com/Question-Honor-Kosciuszko-Squadron-Forgotten/dp/037572625X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1244672211&sr=1-1

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19. World War II Behind Closed Doors: Stalin, the Nazis and the West [Hardcover] Laurence Rees

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/030737730X/ref=s9_simz_gw_s0_p14_t1?pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=center-2&pf_rd_r=0WGDVSP0XWTNASQHYHER&pf_r

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20. My Dear Mr. Stalin: The Complete Correspondence of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Joseph V. Stalin by Susan Butler (Jan 10, 2006)

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=My+Dear+Mr+Stalin

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21. Hollywood's War with Poland, 1939-1945 [Hardcover]

M.B.B. Biskupski (Author)

http://www.amazon.com/Hollywoods-Poland-1939-1945-M-B-B-Biskupski/dp/0813125596/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1294091607&sr=1-1

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22. This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen (Penguin Classics) [Paperback]

Tadeusz Borowski (FICTION by a Camp survivor)

(Author), Barbara Vedder (Editor, Translator), Michael Kandel (Translator), Jan Kott (Introduction)

http://www.amazon.com/This-Ladies-Gentlemen-Penguin-Classics/dp/0140186247/ref=tag_stp_s2f_edpp_url

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23. I Saw Poland Betrayed: An American ambassador reports to the American people (The Americanist library) by Arthur Bliss Lane (1965)

http://www.amazon.com/Saw-Poland-Betrayed-ambassador-Americanist/dp/B0007E3J7A/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1294094527&sr=1-1

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24. No Greater Ally: The Untold Story of Poland's Forces in World War II

Kenneth K. Koskodan (Author)

http://www.amazon.com/No-Greater-Ally-Polands-Military/dp/1849084793/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1298424405&sr=1-1

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25. DUPES: How America's Adversaries Have Manipulated Progressives for a Century [Hardcover] Paul Kengor

http://www.amazon.com/DUPES-Americas-Adversaries-Manipulated-Progressives/dp/1935191756/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1294116789&sr=1-1

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26. Books by Norman Davies

Europe at War 1939-1945
Europe: A History
Rising ’44: The Battle for Warsaw
White Eagle, Red Star: The Polish-Soviet War 1919-20
God’s Playground: A History of Poland (Volume I & Volume II)
Heart of Europe: A Short History of Poland
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27. Suggested by John Bartoszynski

Stalin and the Poles; An Indictment of the Soviet leaders [Hardcover]

Bronislaw Kusnierz (Author)

http://www.amazon.com/Stalin-Poles-indictment-Soviet-leaders/dp/B000L9A5SC/ref=sr_1_fkmr0_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1294255784&sr=1-2-fkmr0

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28. Suggested by John Bartoszynski

THE RAPE OF POLAND, Pattern of Soviet Aggression. Whittley House, 1948, 309 pages H/B

Stanislaw Mikolajczyk

http://www.amazon.com/Rape-Poland-Pattern-Soviet-Aggression/dp/143049638X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1294258194&sr=1-1

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29. Suggested by John Bartoszynski

AN ARMY IN EXILE the Story of the Second Polish Corps [Hardcover]

LT. GENERAL W. ANDERS (Author)

http://www.amazon.com/EXILE-Story-Second-Polish-Corps/dp/B000H48LFU/ref=sr_1_fkmr1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1294281050&sr=1-2-fkmr1

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30. Poland Betrayed: The Nazi-Soviet Invasions of 1939 (Campaign Chronicles) by David Williamson

http://www.amazon.com/POLAND-BETRAYED-Nazi-Soviet-Invasions-Chronicles/dp/1844159264/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1294378483&sr=1-1

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31. Warsaw 1920: Lenin's Failed Conquest of Europe by Adam Zomoyski

http://www.amazon.com/Warsaw-1920-Lenins-Failed-Conquest/dp/0007225520/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1294378933&sr=1-1-spell

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32. Genocide and Rescue in Wolyn: Recollections of the Ukrainian Nationalist Ethnic Cleansing Campaign Against the Poles During World War II by Tadeusz Piotrowski

http://www.amazon.com/Genocide-Rescue-Wolyn-Recollections-Nationalist/dp/078644245X/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top

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33. Other books by Tadeusz Piotrowski

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=tadeusz+piotrowski&x=11&y=21

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34. Story of a Secret State [Paperback] Jan Karski (Author)

http://www.amazon.com/Story-Secret-State-Jan-Karski/dp/1931541396/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1294382166&sr=1-1

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35. Karski: How One Man Tried to Stop the Holocaust [Paperback]

E. Thomas Wood (Author), Stanislaw M. Jankowski (Author)

http://www.amazon.com/Karski-How-Tried-Stop-Holocaust/dp/0471145734/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1294382166&sr=1-3

________________________________

36. Irena Sendler: Mother of the Children of the Holocaust by Anna Mieszkowska (Hardcover - Nov 18, 2010)

http://www.amazon.com/Irena-Sendler-Mother-Children-Holocaust/dp/0313385939/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1294382620&sr=8-2

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37. Rape of Europa: The Fate of Europe's Treasures in the Third Reich and the Second World War [Paperback]

http://www.amazon.com/Rape-Europa-Europes-Treasures-Second/dp/0679756868/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1294424862&sr=1-1

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38. The Polish Club in San Francisco Recommends Movies and Books...

http://www.polishclubsf.org/Recommended.htm

_________________________________

39. "Poland in the Rockies" recommends...

http://www.polandintherockies.com/recommended-reading

_______________________________

40. Maps and Shadows by Krysia Jopek

http://www.amazon.com/Maps-Shadows-Novel-Krysia-Jopek/dp/1607720078/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1294693451&sr=1-1

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41. Polish Greatness Book List (some repeats from above, but many new ones also)

http://polishgreatness.blogspot.com/p/polish-greatness-book-store.html

________________________________

42. Escaping Danger by Dorothy Dubel (HISTORICAL FICTION)

http://www.amazon.com/Escaping-Danger-Dorothy-Dubel/dp/1436383781/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1294789108&sr=1-1

___________________________________

43. Via Krysia Styrna Facebook Page

Tell The West, Jerzy G Gliksman (Author), 1948

http://www.amazon.com/Tell-West-Jerzy-G-Gliksman/dp/B0007DJVBE/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1294900406&sr=1-2

For Recent review see:

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,798432,00.html

________________________________________

44. The Ghosts of Europe by Anna Porter

http://www.amazon.com/Ghosts-Europe-Central-Europes-Uncertain/dp/0312681224/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1295057614&sr=1-1

____________________________________

45. The Polish Officer by Alan Furst

http://www.amazon.com/Polish-Officer-Novel-Alan-Furst/dp/0375758275/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1295057676&sr=1-1

__________________________________

46. Escape from Warsaw by Ian Serraillier

http://www.amazon.com/Escape-Warsaw-Original-title-Silver/dp/0590437151/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1295490573&sr=1-1

_________________________________

47. The Black Devils' March - a Doomed Odyssey: The 1st Polish Armoured Division 1939-45 [Paperback] by Evan McGilvray

http://www.amazon.com/Black-Devils-March-Armoured-Division/dp/1906033536/ref=sr_1_9?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1295889225&sr=1-9

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48. Lightning and Ashes by John Guzlowski

Poems about his Polish Catholic parents who were taken as slave laborers to Nazi Germany.

Recent review: http://venusfebriculosa.com/?p=505

http://www.amazon.com/Lightning-Ashes-John-Guzlowski/dp/0974326453

_________________________________

49. As Far As My Feet Will Carry Me by Josef Bauer

http://www.amazon.com/Far-Feet-Will-Carry-Extraordinary/dp/1602392366/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1295563109&sr=1-1

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50. Suggested by Danusha Goska

Bieganski: The Brute Polak Stereotype in Polish-Jewish Relations and American Popular Culture (Jews of Poland) by Danusha Goska

http://www.amazon.com/Bieganski-Stereotype-Polish-Jewish-Relations-American/dp/1936235153/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1295821557&sr=1-1

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51. Suggested by Stephen Stelmaszuk

The Lion and the Eagle: Polish Second World War Veterans in Scotland (Voice of war series) by Diana M. Henderson

http://www.amazon.com/Lion-Eagle-Polish-Veterans-Scotland/dp/095350364X/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1295881664&sr=1-3

_____________________________________

52. A Blog by Group Member John Guzlowski

Writing the Polish Diaspora -- News and information for Polish Writers and Writers of the Polish Diaspora

http://writingpolishdiaspora.blogspot.com/

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53. Victims of Stalin and Hitler: The Exodus of Poles and Balts to Britain [Hardcover] by Thomas Lane

http://www.amazon.com/Victims-Stalin-Hitler-Exodus-Britain/dp/1403932204/ref=sr_1_fkmr2_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1295885578&sr=1-2-fkmr2

________________________________

54. A Blog by Group Member Martin Stepak

Polish Legacy Poems

http://polishlegacypoems.blogspot.com/

________________________________

55. Suggested by John Burke

Man Is Wolf to Man: Surviving the Gulag [Paperback]

Janusz Bardach (Author), Kathleen Gleeson (Author), Adam Hochschild (Foreword)

http://www.amazon.com/Man-Wolf-Surviving-Gulag/dp/0520221524/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top

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56. Suggested by Denise Jachimowicz Coughlin

Dragon In My Pocket [Hardcover]

Denise Coughlin (Author), Bill Kastan (Illustrator)

http://www.amazon.com/Dragon-My-Pocket-Denise-Coughlin/dp/0976590506/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1295915604&sr=1-1

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57. Suggested by Stephen Stelmaszuk

Lost Between Worlds: A World War II Journey of Survival

by Edward H. Herzbaum

http://www.troubador.co.uk/book_info.asp?bookid=1347

Amazon books link: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Lost-Between-Worlds-Journey-Survival/dp/1848766033/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top

Web Site: http://www.lostbetweenworlds-herzbaum.com/

58. By Parachute to Warsaw by Marek Celt

http://home.teleport.com/~flyheart/tadeusz.htm

_________________________________

59. Memoir of Stanisław Jaskólski -- Victim and Witness to German Death Camp during WWII

http://wewillspeakout.blogspot.com/2011/01/memoir-of-stanislaw-jaskolski-victim.html

________________________________

60. Gulag: A History by Anne Applebaum

http://www.amazon.com/Gulag-History-Anne-Applebaum/dp/1400034094/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1296099461&sr=1-1

_________________________________

61. Polish Civilians Killed in World War II: Janusz Korczak, Rutka Laskier, 108 Martyrs of World War Two, Kalonymus Kalman Shapira, Meir Balaban [Paperback] Books LLC (Editor)

http://www.amazon.com/Polish-Civilians-Killed-World-War/dp/1155385810/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1296257985&sr=1-1

________________________________

62. Soldiers Of Evil -- The Commandants of the Nazi Concentration Camps by Tom Segev

http://www.amazon.com/Soldiers-Evil-Tom-Segev/dp/0425121712/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1296264647&sr=1-1#

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63. Andrzej Pityński Sculpture [Hardcover]

Anna Chudzik (Editor), Andrzej K. Olszewski, Irena Grzesiuk-Olszewska (Introduction)

http://www.amazon.com/Andrzej-Pity%1Aski-Sculpture-Anna-Chudzik/dp/8375760218/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1296320686&sr=1-1

Can be directly ordered from the publisher: Wydawnictwo Bosz, email: biuro@bosz.com.pl

web site is www.bosz.com.pl Andrzej has been called the leading Polish American sculptor and has created many memorials directly related to Polish American and Polish interests

_______________________________

64. The Samaritans: Heroes of the Holocaust

Wladyslaw Bartoszewski (Author), Zofia Lewin (Author)

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0006CF8YK/ref=cm_rdp_product ( For Reviews )

Out of print but used copies are available at:

http://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?sts=t&tn=The+Samaritans%3A+Heroes+of+the+Holocaust&x=70&y=12

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65. Witold's Report (Episodes from Auschwitz)

http://www.amazon.com/Witolds-Report-Episodes-Auschwitz-2/dp/8361618031/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1296416122&sr=1-1

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66. Et Papa tacet: the genocide of Polish Catholics.: An article from: Commonweal [HTML] [Digital]

http://www.amazon.com/Papa-tacet-genocide-Catholics-Commonweal/dp/B000BQFM56/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1296416332&sr=1-1

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67. War Through Children's Eyes

http://www.amazon.com/War-Through-Childrens-Eyes-Deportations/dp/0817974725/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1296418474&sr=8-1

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68. The Polish Army, 1939-45 (Men-at-arms) [Paperback]

http://www.amazon.com/Polish-Army-1939-1945-Men-Arms/dp/0850454174/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1296430377&sr=1-1

________________________________

69. First to Fight: Poland's Contribution to the Allied Victory in WWII

http://www.polishforcesmemorial.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=55&Itemid=76

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70. The Forgotten Few: The Polish Airforce in WWII

http://www.amazon.com/FORGOTTEN-FEW-Polish-Force-World/dp/1848841965/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1296693649&sr=1-1

__________________________________

71. Poland 1939: The Birth of Blitzkrieg

http://www.amazon.com/Poland-1939-Birth-Blitzkrieg-Campaign/dp/1841764086/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1296693288&sr=1-2

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72. The Polish Campaign 1939

http://www.amazon.com/Polish-Campaign-1939-Steven-Zaloga/dp/087052013X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1296693144&sr=1-1

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73. Polish Resistance in WWII Collection of essays, articles, links, and an excellent readking list of dozens of books too numerous to list here

http://www.polishresistance-ak.org/FurtherR.htm

_______________________________

74. Secret City: The Hidden Jews of Warsaw, 1940-1945 [Hardcover]

by Dr. Gunnar S. Paulsson

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0300095465/ref=cm_rdp_product

________________________________

75. The Mass Deportation of Poles to Siberia: A Historical Narrative Based on the Written Testimony of the Polish Siberian Survivors by Michael Carolan

http://www.amazon.com/Mass-Deportation-Poles-Siberia-Historical/dp/1615848118

________________________________

76. Polish Poetry from the Soviet Gulags: Recovering a Lost Literature [Hardcover] Halina Ablamowicz (Author)

http://www.amazon.com/dp/0773449345?tag=everythisjake-20&camp=213381&creative=390973&linkCode=as4&creativeASIN=0773449345&adid=0JCE5CPZ6FMV4VZFK2Y0&

________________________________

77. Legacy of the White Eagle; Includes a CD at the Back of Book [Paperback] by Julian Kulski

http://www.amazon.com/LEGACY-WHITE-EAGLE-Back-Book/dp/142430525X

also available at: http://www.poloniatoday.com/Merchant2/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Store_Code=PTOS&Product_Code=JK-PT-4

__________________________________

78. Exiled to Siberia [Hardcover] By Klaus Hergt

http://www.amazon.com/Exiled-Siberia-Klaus-Hergt/dp/0970043201/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top

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79. Children of the Katyń Massacre: Accounts of Life After the 1940 Soviet Murder of Polish POWs [Abridged] [Paperback] Teresa Kaczorowska

http://www.amazon.com/Children-Katyn-Massacre-Accounts-Soviet/dp/0786427566/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top

also at: http://www.jacketflap.com/bookdetail.asp?bookid=0786427566

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80. Out of the Cross by Rev. Charles Jan Di Mascola

http://www.polamjournal.com/News/Reviews/reviews.html (Scroll down to get to the review and name of publishers...book is not avalible through Amazon unfortunately) This book is about the 108 members of the Polish Catholic clergy designated as WWII martyrs.

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81. The Civilian Population and the Warsaw Uprising of 1944 [Paperback] by Joanna K. M. Hanson

http://www.amazon.com/Civilian-Population-Warsaw-Uprising-1944/dp/0521531195/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1298485962&sr=8-1

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82. Your Life Is Worth Mine: How Polish Nuns Saved Hundreds of Jewish Children in German-Occupied Poland, 1939-1945 [Hardcover] by Ewa Kurek

http://www.amazon.com/Your-Life-Worth-Mine-German-Occupied/dp/0781804094

__________________________________

83. Wojtek the Bear: Polish War Hero by Aileen Orr

http://www.waterstones.com/waterstonesweb/products/aileen%2Borr/wojtek%2Bthe%2Bbear/7756094/

Also http://www.amazon.com/WOJTEK-BEAR-Polish-War-Hero/dp/1841588458

________________________________

84. Enigma: How the Poles Broke the Nazi Code (Polish Histories) [Hardcover]

Wladyslaw Kozaczuk (Author), Jerzy Straszak (Author)

http://www.amazon.com/Enigma-Poles-Broke-Polish-Histories/dp/078180941X/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top

________________________________

85. The report of the Anglo-Polish Historical Committee: Intelligence co-operation between Poland and Great Britain during World War II

http://www.amazon.com/Intelligence-Co-Operation-Between-Poland-Britain/dp/085303656X

_________________________________

86. Fighting Warsaw: The Story of the Polish Underground State 1939-1945

by Stefan Korboński

http://www.amazon.com/Fighting-Warsaw-Polish-Underground-1939-1945/dp/0781810353

_________________________________

87. The Spring Will Be Ours: Poland and the Poles from Occupation to Freedom

By Andrzej Paczkowski

http://www.amazon.com/Spring-Will-Be-Ours-Occupation/dp/0271023082

_________________________________

88. Night of Flames: A Novel of World War II [Hardcover]Douglas W. Jacobson

http://www.amazon.com/Night-Flames-Novel-World-War/dp/1590131363/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top

_________________________________

89. A World Apart: Imprisonment in a Soviet Labor Camp During World War II [Paperback]

http://www.amazon.com/World-Apart-Imprisonment-Soviet-During/dp/0140251847

______________________________

90. In My Hands: Memories of a Holocaust Rescuer (9780553494112): Irene Opdyke

http://www.amazon.com/My-Hands-Memories-Holocaust-Rescuer/dp/0553494112/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1298859479&sr=1-1

______________________________

91. DPs: Europe’s Displaced Persons, 1945-1951 and

Round-Trip to America, both by Mark Wyman

http://www.amazon.com/Dps-Europes-Displaced-Persons-1945-1951/dp/0801485428

and

http://www.amazon.com/Round-Trip-America-Immigrants-1880-1930-Paperbacks/dp/0801481120/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1299035981&sr=1-.

The Day My Mother Died

2011-01-25T10:21:00.000-08:00

Thanksgiving Day Poem

2010-11-23T16:19:00.000-08:00

I wrote the following poem to thank my parents and all of my relatives who suffered in World War II. Some like my parents survived and others didn't.

Thanksgiving Day Poem

My people were all Polish people,
the ones who survived to look
in my eyes and touch my fingers
and those who didn’t, dying instead

of fever or hunger or a bullet
in the face, dying maybe thinking
of how their deaths were balanced
by my birth or one of the other

stories the Poles tell themselves
to give themselves the strength
to crawl out of their own graves.

Not all of them had this strength
but enough did, so that I’m here
and you’re here reading this poem
about them. What kept them going?

Maybe something in the souls
of people who start with nothing
and end with nothing, and in between
live from one handful of nothing
to the next handful of nothing.

They keep going--through the terror
in the snow and the misery
in the rain--till some guy pierces
their stomachs with a bayonet

or some sickness grips them, and still
they keep going, even when there
aren’t any rungs on the ladder
even when there aren’t any ladders.

_________________________

My book Lightning and Ashes contains much of my parents' story of the war years and their lives after they came to the US as Displaced Persons.

Sept. 1, 1939: The Day World War II Started

2010-09-02T08:16:00.000-07:00

Seventy-one years ago, on September 1, 1939, the Nazis invaded Poland. In those first days and the six years that followed, more than five million Poles died.

I've written a number of poems about the first days of the war and what happened to Poland, but none of those poems ever captured, I felt, the struggle of the Polish people to throw off the Nazi invasion.

A couple of years ago, I tried again to describe what my parents and the Poles of their generation felt. Here's the poem:

Landscape with Dead Horses

1.

War comes down like a hammer, heavy and hard
flattening the earth and killing the soft things:
horses and children, flowers and hope, love
and the smell of the farmers’earth, the coolness
of the creek, the look of trees as they uncurl
their leaves in late March and early April.
You smell the horses before you see them.

2.

Horses groan, their heads nailed to the ground
their bodies rocking crazily, groaning
like men trying to lift their heads for one
last breath, to breathe, to force cold air
into their shredded, burning lungs.
For these horses and the men who rode them,
this world will never again be the world
God made; and still they dare to raise their heads,
to force the air into their shredded lungs.

3.

Look at this horse. Its head torn from its body
by a shell. So much blood will teach you more
about the world than all the books in it.
This horse’s head will remake the world for you—
teach even God a lesson about the stones
that wait to rise in our hearts, cold and hard.

4.

In the end Hitler sat in his cold bunker
and asked his generals about his own horses,
“Where are they?” He asked, “Where are my horses?”
And no one dared to tell him, “They are dead
in the fields with the Poles and their horses,
bloated with death and burning with our corpses.”

________________________________________________

This poem originally appeared in War, Literature, and the Arts along with several other poems I wrote about Poland and the war. Here's a link to those poems. Click here.

By the way, in that same issue of WLA, there are also poems about war by Polish-American writers John Minczeski and Lisa Siedlarz.

Click here for my previous post on September 1, 1939.
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The photograph of re-enactors in 1939 uniforms was taken by Mr. Mazowieckie at a re-enactment of the Bzura River Battle.

Father's Day

2010-06-18T08:25:00.000-07:00

My father didn't teach me to fish or play ball or paint a fence or drive a car. He couldn't do any of those things. He was an orphan who worked on his aunt's farm in Poland until the Nazis came and took him to a concentration camp. When he got to America after the war, he was too busy working to do much of anything else. You don't learn a lot beyond the basics when you lead that kind of life.

But he did teach me somethings: to care for my family, work hard, and love life.

Happy Father's Day, Dad.

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To read more about my dad, click on the following poems from my book Lightning and Ashes:

Why My Mother Stayed with My Father

What My Father Believed

Looking for Work in America

Code Name: Zegota: Rescuing Jews in Occupied Poland, 1942-1945: The Most Dangerous Conspiracy

2010-06-07T07:17:00.000-07:00

Irene Tomaszewski and Tecia Werbowski have recently published the American edition of their book about Polish attempts to save Jews during the Holocaust.

Code Name: Zegota: Rescuing Jews in Occupied Poland, 1942-1945: The Most Dangerous Conspiracy in Wartime Europe tells the story of the only secret organization in occupied Europe set up for the sole purpose of saving Jews. The first book on the subject in English, it details the danger and complexity behind Zegota rescue attempts, clarifying the relationship of the Germans, who had total control; the Poles, who were relegated to sub-human status and treated as slave labor; and the Jews, designated nonhuman and collectively condemned to death. Illuminating the moral dilemmas that arose as one life was pitted against another under the lawless apartheid conditions created by the Nazis, Code Name: Zegota explores the critical situation in occupied Poland and the personalities that responded to desperate conditions with a mix of courage and creativity. It profiles the key players and the network behind them and describes the sophisticated organization and its mode of operation. The cast of characters ranges from members of prewar Poland's cultural and political elite to Girl Guides and Boy Scouts, who worked as couriers. As this inspiring book shows, all of these brave souls risked torture, concentration camps, and death—and many paid the price.

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The book is available from Greenwood Press and Amazon.

Irene Tomaszewski is one of the editors of Cosmopolitan Review.

Memorial Day: My Wife's Uncle Buddy

2010-05-30T16:35:00.000-07:00

I first posted this blog about 2 years ago:

I got a letter from Linda's Uncle Buddy.

For Christmas, Linda's dad Tony gave his brother Buddy a copy of Third Winter of War: Buchenwald, my book about my dad's experiences in that camp, and Uncle Buddy wanted to tell me about it.

The letter means a lot to me, and you'll see why when you read it.

Here's his letter:

Dear John,

I read the poems you wrote. I found them very moving. I'm no whiz kid about understanding every line you wrote but I could feel the sadness, the hurt, and the agony in your poems. I hope when people read these poems they will realize how these people in the camps suffered and how they were tortured.

I guess I feel it more because I saw it. It took me 50 years to talk about it. I still think about it, and my nightmares that come and go.

The camp we took back in April 4, 1945 was a sub-station to Buchenwald. It was called Ohrdruf.
Be well, our love to you and Linda and Lillian
Uncle Buddy

PS. Don't ever stop writing.

___________________________

That was the letter, and as I said, it means a lot to me.
I knew Buddy had helped liberate the concentration camp at Ohrdruf. A couple years ago a video came out called Nightmare's End: The Liberation of the Camps. It's a powerful documentary about the soldiers who freed the camps.

When I was still teaching, I would sometimes show this film in my American Lit class when we were talking about the literature of the World War II period. The response would pretty much be the same every time I showed it. I would roll the video tape and turn off the lights. The film would come on. First, there would be silence. Then there would be weeping. At the end of the film, I wouldn't turn the lights back on right away because I knew that students wanted some time alone with their thoughts and emotions.

I saw this documentary maybe a dozen time, and it always moved me. And what always moved me most was watching Uncle Buddy and listening to him.

In the documentary, he's being interviewed by a person who's off camera. All we see is Uncle Buddy, and he just starts talking about going into the camp, and what you realize immediately is that his memories of that day he came to Ohrdruf, April 4, 1945, are as new and intense as they were then. He was in his late teens when he came upon the camp, and in the video he's in his late 70s. Fifty years have gone by and the memories are still new, still intense. What he saw will never leave him. It will always be there.

He can barely talk about what he remembers seeing, but he forces himself to go on and what he says about the prisoners in that concentration camp is simple and human and profound: "They were just people."

Thanks, Uncle Buddy.

April 11 is Holocaust Remembrance Day

2010-03-31T07:58:00.000-07:00

I can remember the Holocaust, but I can't do much more. I can't imagine it, I can't describe it, I can't understand it.

My parents weren't Jews. They weren't in the Holocaust. They were Polish Catholics who were taken to Germany to work as slave laborers in the concentration camps there. My dad spent four and a half years in Buchenwald, and my mom spent more than two years in a number of camps around Magdeburg. They suffered terribly, and they saw terrible things done to the people they loved. My mother's family was decimated. Her mother, her sister, and her sister's baby were killed outright by the Nazis. My mother's two aunts were taken to Auschwitz with their Jewish husbands and died there.

I remember asking my mother once if she could explain to me what she felt in the worst month of her worst year in the slave labor camps in Germany. All she could say was, you weren't there.

I wasn't there.

I've spent much of my life writing about the things that happened to my parents in the slave labor camps and reading about what happened in those camps and in the Nazi death camps in Poland where so many Jews died, and still I will never be able to understand or comprehend what happened to the Jews in the Holocaust.

I went to Auschwitz in 1990 with my wife Linda and our daughter Lillian. We walked around, took pictures, tried to imagine what had happened there. We couldn't. We were just tourists.

I wrote a poem about it:

Tourists in Auschwitz

It’s a gray drizzly day
but still we take pictures:

Here we are by the mountain of shoes.
Here we are by a statue of people
working to death
pulling a cart full of stones.

Here we are by the wall where they shot
the rabbis and the priests
and the school children
and the trouble makers.

We walk around some too
but we see no one.

Later, we will have dinner
in the cafeteria at Auschwitz.

We will eat off aluminum plates
with aluminum knives and forks.
The beans will be hard,
and the bread will be tasteless.

But for right now, we take more pictures:

Here we are by the mountain of empty suitcases.
Here we are in front of the big ovens.
Here we are by the gate with the famous slogan.

Here we are in front of the pond
where the water is still gray from the ashes
the Germans dumped.

The German--A Short Story about the War

2010-03-22T11:00:00.000-07:00

In the year after her death, I was writing a lot of poems about my mother and my father and their experiences in the war. Those poems grew into my book Lightning and Ashes.

One of the poems that didn't get into that book was a sonnet called "Early Fall." It's about the German soldiers who killed my grandmother and my aunt and her baby. I had written poems about what happened after that day, but up to that point I hadn't written about that day. The sonnet describes the soldiers just before they enter my grandmother's house to kill the women inside.

"Early Fall" ends with one of the soldiers pushing the door open with the barrel of his rifle and taking the first step into the house.

Writing the poem started me thinking. I tried to visualize what actually happened in that house in the woods west of Lvov. Of course, I had heard about what happened from both my parents, but I had never tried to imagine that moment when the Germans came and the sequence of events that followed. The story below grew out of that imagining, and so did my unpublished novel The Soldier and the Widow.

THE GERMAN

With the barrel of his rifle, he slowly pushed the door open, but he didn’t enter. The log hut’s single room was like all of the rooms he’d seen since crossing the border into Russia. There was a mud floor, a wooden table, and two rough-cut chairs. In the corner next to the stove stood an empty wooden pen where they had kept some kind of small animal, perhaps a pig or calf. On the table, a lamp burned unsteadily, flickered like the fuel had been mixed with water. In the shadows he saw an old woman asleep in a bed. The bed smelled of wet and sour rags. He could smell it from a dozen feet away.

He wondered how people could live like this, in small rooms with dirt and animals, and so little light that a man had to spend his life squinting at things, struggling to see clearly. But outside it was already dark, and the snow was falling harder, so he entered.

Raising his rifle, he walked over to the old woman lying in the bed. Her eyes and mouth were open, a babushka hid her hair but he knew it must be thin and gray. Her skin was gray too, a yellow gray. This woman was old the way the earth was old in the late fall, spent with spring and summer work, tired of doing everything that needed to be done each day.

The soldier stood above her next to the bed and felt the weight of his rifle in his hands. Even after four years of carrying it, it was still heavy. He wanted to put it down, and he wanted many other things too. He wanted warmth first and then safety. Yes,safety would be good, and a wife and food and a God who would take pity on him and send His only Beloved Son to do the killing the man felt he couldn’t do anymore. But he knew too that wishing and praying were useless. He’d seen the ashes of too many churches and synagogues. He’d settle for food.

He poked the old woman’s shoulder with the barrel of his Mauser.

At first she didn’t move at all, and he thought she must be ill or weak from hunger, but then she moved a little. She drew in a ragged breath and then another. Her breathing was grim and harsh. There was no sweetness to it. She drew the breath deep into her lungs slowly like she was filling a glass past overflowing. He poked her again, and she opened her eyes slowly and looked at him without moving her head.

There was cold and silence in the room, but he didn’t sense any fear. In peddler’s Russian he said, “Grandmother, I’m hungry.”

She didn’t say anything. He felt her staring at him. She probably knew by his accent and gray uniform that he was a German. Then, she nodded with her eyes and began to rise. Her right hand gripped the edge of the bed, and her body tensed for the work of lifting itself. Like her breathing, the rising was grim and painful. Old people carry burdens that would break a young man’s faith and hope.

The German sat down on one of the clumsy wooden chairs and looked at the old woman. Maybe once she was young and had some life in her veins, but now she was like a dead creature, like something left in a barn for too long, a cow whose fat and muscle had thinned in a dry season when the grass was burnt and gone by the first of July.

He watched her as she walked slowly to the door and closed it. Then she moved over to a small porcelain stove. It’s pretty, he thought—a creamy white with large green flowers on the oven door. He wondered how it got here to this shack in the middle of this flat, dead country. There was nothing else in the room that spoke of wealth like this stove did. He felt there must be a story to it, but he didn’t want to ask. A story would just slow her down, and he was hungry.

He slapped the palm of his hand on the table once and shouted in German that he wanted food and he wanted it quickly, “Mach schnell, frau, essen, essen!” The sharp noise and the shouting did not startle her. The old woman continued to move slowly, lighting a match to the crumpled newspaper in the stove, closing the door, dragging a large wooden box across the floor with both hands so it would be near the stove.

Then, she started taking metal cans out of the box. They were army issue. Some had big German lettering, some had Russian. One of the large cans had script that was neither German Gothic nor Russian Cyrillic. He couldn’t make it out in the shadows.

Maybe it was Japanese. The letters looked like pagodas and huts and trees. He wondered how she came by these cans, and imagined some soldier from the war between Russia and Japan, the old one, the one fought in the high desert country of Mongolia and Korea, passing through here forty or fifty years ago and trading the cans for a look at her breasts or a poke at her cunt. Maybe fifty years ago she was something to look at, still a girl then, a blonde, moving like a slow cool breeze on a hot day. Now she moved like a spent mule on a cold day, broken and shivering.

He knew that pounding his palm on the table wouldn’t get her moving any faster. This woman moved as she moved. She was bone and hanging skin and breathing that came from the center of the earth, all harsh and ragged whispers.

He took his steel helmet off and unwound the rags that kept his ears warm. Then, he ran his hand through his hair. It was matted and greasy, and he felt lice and fleas there, spending the winter like they were millionaires on some sun bleached Riviera beach. He scratched his head with both hands lightly so as not to draw blood, and he tried to remember the last time he bathed. It was a month ago probably. Some place farther east, maybe near Kursk, when his squad had to guard a ford that the Mark IV’s were going to use to cross over a stream so they could get out of the way of the Russians. He and the others waited for two days for those tanks. The hollow boom of artillery firing in the distance disrupted their days, and in the nights they could see flashes too, purple and yellow against the clouds, filling the sky like bruises. The waiting men took turns bathing in the water upstream from the ford, first the boys in the squad and then the old men. The boys splashed and laughed and tried to dunk each other; the old men stood in silence in the water washing their faces and hands. And always while some bathed, others watched and listened for the partisans. A place like that was full of them, and a small squad alone at a stream was like hot milk sweetened with honey to the Russians.

He looked at the old woman again. She had opened a can with a key and was heating some kind of meat in thick dark brown gravy. He wondered if she knew any partisans. Maybe her son was with them, or her daughter, or her husband. The German knew she had probably seen her fill of killing. She must be sixty or seventy. How many dead had she seen in her life? Ten? Fifty? A hundred? And who were they? Children?

Husbands? Parents? Grandparents? Neighbors? Too many to remember all of their names, he thought. If you lived long enough, the dead you knew outnumbered the living, and they were closer to you.

And now this war. Three years of armies moving here and there across her land. If she looked out her door any summer morning, she would see the soldiers or their dust. Hear them too if the wind was coming from the right direction. Smell them too. It would be better in the winter perhaps. Like now. With a heavy wet snow falling, you couldn’t hear or smell anything more than ten meters away. Couldn’t see it either, not even five meters away. Your home would be safe, hidden from the soldiers, unless they fell upon it by accident as they were fleeing or rushing forward.

He raised his head and said, “I bet I startled you, little mother. Coming in like I did with you lying there, maybe even sleeping. I bet it made your heart jerk. I bet you felt like a young girl again, a yellow-haired maiden with flowers in her hands waiting for her first kiss behind the church.”

The woman stopped stirring the meat in the shallow, black pan, and looked at him. She was bent like a willow, and the skin on her face and hands was hard and cracked with the cold, despite the fat she had rubbed into it. The hand with the wooden spoon was almost shut completely with arthritis. Her fingers thin and crippled like tree limbs, her knuckles fat and red. Her eyes didn’t say much, just that she had been here before, fed other men, knew how to give them what they wanted so they would leave her alone.

She turned back to her stirring, and the German looked away from her. There was a window in this hut, and where the newspaper she had pressed against the window had pealed back, he could see the snow falling, coming down harder. He knew that by the time night came he wouldn’t be able to leave this hut, if he was still here. But where could he go? There were no towns nearby, only armies fumbling in the cold and the dark, pressing here and there, and hoping that the morning would show that their blind movements had brought them some small advantage.

Suddenly, he wanted to talk. For days he’d been alone, ever since his squad had entered that ravine and they were ambushed by the partisans hiding in a stand of birch trees.

His comrades died there, slowly at first, then quicker and quicker. The bullets ricocheting off the rocks and boulders with a terrible zwingging noise, trees exploding into splinters, splinters burning quickly and spreading their fire to the twigs and underbrush. There was nowhere to hide from that noise and the fire and the splintering wood that would kill a man slower than a bullet but as surely. First one of the sergeants fell, and then another. Peter fell with a wrist-thick piece of oak embedded in his throat like a wooden lightning bolt. He had been with the German since they crossed the border into Poland three years ago. Then the Hungarian boy Jurek dropped, then it was happening so fast that the German could not say, this one fell next and then that one fell. All he knew was that he had to run, get away from the ravine and the Russians. He crawled back up the hill, the way his squad had come down. And while he crawled, bullets picked at him, hit at him, moved him this way and then that, but still he kept climbing up the ravine. He felt like an old man crawling up a sand dune under a load of bricks that was getting heavier and heavier with each bullet that ripped at his clothes and cut at his skin. But he didn’t stop till he crested the hill and left behind the ravine with his dead comrades.

He had left dead men behind before and he knew that it would hurt him only for a little while. The next day, Peter and Jurek and the others would just be the dead.

The soldier stared at the old woman again. He wanted her to say something, he wanted to hear a voice. “Mother,” he asked in Russian, “do you live here alone?”

She didn’t say anything; she kept stirring the canned meat with her crooked fingers. Her back was too him, but he knew she had heard him because she had stopped stirring for a second when he first asked the question.

He tried again. “Mother, I said, do you live alone in this hut?”

She turned her head and looked at him over her shoulder. “I live here with my husband; he’s out looking for the pig. She got away yesterday morning when the soldiers came.”

“A pig? I’m surprised there’s anything left here. This war’s not easy on pigs.”

She moved toward him, placed a tin plate on the table. She didn’t offer him a knife or fork, but he didn’t expect her to. He had the ones the army gave him, his first day as a soldier. They were bright as the chrome on a new Mercedes roadster then.

“Rest yourself while I eat,” he said, and gestured for her to sit across from him on the other chair.

She moved instead to the bed and sat down on the comforter. It was a pale red color and thin, almost flat. The goose feathers in it were old; they must have lost their fullness, their fatness a generation ago. She put her hands in her lap and looked at him without speaking.

“Why are you so quiet?” he said. “I bet when your old man is around you’re a regular hen, pecking and clucking at him. Tell me something, anything. Tell me what’s it been like here this fall?”

She shrugged and sat in silence, her eyes on his eyes. Then she started speaking slowly. She told him that the fall had been hard so far. Early in October, there was rain and mud, and then the cold started and the mud froze. She liked it when the mud froze. She didn’t like the smell of the mud when it was wet—it was like manure, like living in a toilet. It was better when the muck froze. She could walk outside and not worry about the mud sucking her boots off. Her husband lost a rubber boot once right outside the door. The mud was like a demon, it just sucked the boot right off his foot, like a giant mouth. Her husband never found the boot. Not even in the spring.

The German thought about what she said, the mud like a giant mouth. Here in Russia he had seen mud like that, seen men disappear into the mud and never appear again. He’d felt it pulling him under more than once too. He could picture in his mind this mud like a mouth—and it was almost like a short movie, one that you would expect a dancing and singing mouse in gloves and a tuxedo to appear in, scolding the old woman’s husband for stepping on the mud. The German thought about this mud like a giant’s mouth and the dancing mouse and started laughing, deep laughs, loud and long. He imagined the mouse singing something in Italian, maybe a happy song of love and hope from some opera. It was a funny thought, and after a while he stopped laughing, and then he picked up the brown-gray meat with his fork. He looked at it for a second and bit off a piece.

Chewing, he watched the woman stare at him. She’d stopped talking. He knew his laughter must have made her nervous. He was a German sitting in her hut with a rifle leaning against her table, and he was laughing. She must fear what would come next. He watched her pull something out of her pocket. It looked like a leather shoestring. Her arthritic, twisted fingers started worrying it, knotting it and unknotting it.

The meat in his mouth was hard, stringy with gristle. He knew it was horse meat but he was hungry, and just having something in his mouth to chew made him happy. He felt the warmth of the meat already in his stomach, and he remembered when he was a boy eating bread with butter after a long day of fasting and waiting for the communion host. The old nuns used to say that God wanted us to wait because patience brought us closer to him.

He pointed at the old woman with his knife and hoped she saw the smile through his beard. “Go on,” he said, “tell me some more.”

So she began again. This time she told him about how the pig was lost. Yesterday morning as the snow and the wind were slowing, she told him, there was a loud knock at the door and then before she and her husband could get out of bed, two soldiers came in, Russians, her own people.

The old woman said to the German, “One of them was short like a boy, but he wasn’t a boy. He had a hard beard and an angry voice.”

He said, “We’re taking your pig,” and he moved to the wooden pen against the wall. Her husband got out of bed quickly then and stepped in front of the soldier.

“Please, sirs, don’t take the pig,” he said to the soldier. “It’s all we have to get us through this winter. The harvest was nothing, as you know, sirs, and much of what we grew was taken for our boys in the army already.”

She told the German how the short, angry soldier pushed her husband aside and loosened a rope he had in his hands. He and the other soldier entered the pen and tied a harness across the pig’s neck and chest. While the pig squealed and kept trying to push back from the soldiers, the old woman and her husband pleaded, even though they knew pleading was worthless. Soldiers take what they want.

When the soldiers dragged the pig out of the hut, she and her husband followed them out into the cold and snow. They knew that nothing would bring the pig back but they could not let it go.

She pleaded with the angry soldier, “Please give us a chit, just some piece of writing that will say you soldiers took our pig. We could show the paper to our village headman, and he would get us something in exchange, maybe some rubles or some flour.”

Pulling the pig, the short soldier said, “Mother, I’d give you a receipt if I could, but I can’t write and my comrade here, he’s a fool and he can’t write either.” He laughed as he said this and shoved the pig along with his boot.

Then, there was an explosion in the falling snow. The short soldier died where he stood. A shell exploded his head and scattered red and purple pieces across the front of the wooden hut and the snow on the ground around him. The other soldier didn’t even have time to unshoulder his rifle. There was another explosion in the falling snow, and he dropped to his knees, a spreading red stain growing darker and bolder on his gray tunic. He was dead before his face fell hard on the dirty snow. The startled pig jerked the rope loose from the headless soldier’s hands, scurried across the frozen furrows, and was immediately lost in the snow.

“That’s when my husband took off,” she said. “My husband took off after the pig. He stumbled in the snow and raised himself and stumbled again. He’s an old man, and his legs aren’t much good. He disappeared into the snow on his knees.”

The German didn’t wait for the story to end. He couldn’t stop laughing. He dropped the fork and moved his hand to his eyes to wipe away the tears. Really, he thought, this story is better than the Laurel and Hardy films, the silent ones they show in Magdeburg. The old woman had the gypsy’s gift for story telling, and he thought again about her husband falling and crawling after the pig.

“Mother,” the soldier said, “pardon my laughing. You must be thinking, just like a German to be laughing at another’s misfortune, but really, I haven’t laughed this way for a month, not since we retreated across the River Desna. If I had a kopec, I would give it to you for these stories.”

She looked at him and frowned. She slowly shook her head from side to side in disapproval.

When he stopped laughing, he asked for another piece of meat and chewed it slowly after she gave it to him. He wasn’t used to food and the heat in the room, slight as it was. They made him drowsy. Soon he would want to sleep, but he was afraid of falling asleep. This woman was Russian, and even though she might blame the Russian soldiers for the loss of her pig and her husband, the German knew he couldn’t trust her not to kill him while he slept. He’d heard plenty of stories about Germans dying with their throats cut in some Russian peasant’s shack. And he’d seen too many dead German soldiers sitting at wooden tables with their tunics unbuttoned and their boots off. Maybe if he tied her up he’d be safe—safe from her at least.

He pushed the empty plate away and asked her for some rope, not much, just enough to hobble a horse.

She looked at him and started talking softly, “Why do you want a rope? Are you going to strangle me, or tie me up and take me somewhere? What if my husband comes back with the pig and finds me gone? What will he say? He’s like me, old and weak. We don’t make war on soldiers, or anyone. We couldn’t even stop the soldiers from taking the pig. Or the cow before that. Or the grain even before that.”

“Don’t worry, Frau,” he said. “I won’t take you away. Why would I want to drag an old witch like you anywhere? And where would we go? Back to Berlin? You’d be a prize catch. Better than a Soviet general. Better than your holy Stalin. I just want to tie you up so that I can sleep peacefully without you cutting my throat with your butcher knife.”

“You don’t have to worry. I’ve never killed anyone.”

“I’m sure, but what if your husband comes back and finds me here asleep, maybe he’ll think I’m trying some funny business with you, and he’ll try to shoot me. Or maybe the two of you will try to kill me.”

“You don’t have to worry. He’s an old man with lungs that are thin like paper. And a bad back, too. He won’t try to do anything to hurt you.”

“Shut up. This isn’t a debate. I’m going to tie you up.”

In the shadows at the other end of the room, he saw a stretch of rope hanging from the pig pen, and took it and cut it into two lengths. Then he ordered her to sit in the other chair. With one length he tied her hands up, with the other he tied her feet. Then, he picked her up and carried her to the bed. He put her near the edge and covered her with part of the red comforter.

She said nothing and lay with her face pressed to the mattress.

He looked at her and wondered what she was thinking. She was probably afraid, he imagined. An old woman, brittle bones, not much strength in her hands and legs, tied up by a German soldier—she must be thinking he was going to torture her, or rape her. She was surely afraid. And she was right to be. Some would take a poke at her—no matter that she was 60 or 70. A soldier, German, Russian, English, Hungarian, American, Italian, whatever, out here in this frozen muck, wandering around like a gypsy without home or family, would take her and spread her and be happy for the moment’s comfort no matter how much she fought, no matter how much she pleaded.

The German drifted away for a second and saw again the bodies of the dead women he came across last week. They were scattered like dominoes out next to a barn, a dozen of them, some young as school girls, some like this woman, old and broken, and all their skirts were lifted up, bloody and twisted hard with mud. These women, he knew, must have been raped until they could not scream. He had seen this kind of thing before. The women were raped even when they were dead, just so one last soldier could pause for a moment in the middle of this war and forget that he himself was a dead man. The German had seen it before and would see it again. The road from here back to Berlin was long.

He shook his head and thought, here we are, yes, here we are, the world in all its glory and beauty.

He looked again at the old woman, and she was staring up at him. There was nothing in her eyes, no worry or fear. She just looked tired, like she wanted all of this stupidity, the war and the lost pig and the husband who disappeared into the falling snow, to end.

He turned away from her and stepped to the table and the lamp. He turned the knob and the weak flame flickered even more, and then it died. The darkness in the room was tinged with a purple light, a darkness mixed with light reflected from the snow still falling outside. He remembered that this was how the nights looked when he was a young boy in Magdeburg playing outside in the street late in the evening after a heavy snow fall, the mysterious purple light that came from nowhere and came from everywhere. There was beauty in it, and magic too. It felt like the whole world was waiting on his pleasure, like God Himself was staring down from heaven, His elbows spread across a giant windowsill, and He was smiling at him playing in the snow, rolling snow boulders in the night, and maybe it was God’s smile that showered a purple light across the dark, snow-crusted world.

The German shook himself back to the moment. He was tired and thinking too much. Soon he’d be weeping and falling on his knees. He knew he needed sleep.

He made his way to the bed, and climbed over the old lady. She said nothing, not a groan even when his weight pressed down on her for a moment. If she had, maybe he would have asked her pardon. Instead, he pulled the comforter over himself and wondered why it was red. Did Stalin give a red comforter to every woman who gave birth to a strong son or a fecund daughter? The German smiled in the dark at the thought of Stalin, the great Soviet Grandfather with smoking pipe and perpetual smile and work camps and prison camps and five-year plans that left poor people staring into empty cups. The German moved closer to the old woman. He hoped for some warmth, but there wasn’t much.

He knew it would be a cold night. He heard the wind outside. It was like a broom sweeping ice into the world. The door and the wall and the windows would not keep this blizzard out. In the morning, he knew, there would be snow on the frozen mud floor. He snuggled against the old woman, pulled her closer to him gently, and tried to will himself to sleep, tried to empty his thoughts, but couldn’t.

He thought about how some morning he would not rise, would not wake. Some night, the cold would take him before dawn, and some fellows would find his body then, stiff as a plank. They would leave him where they found him, frozen across some path or next to some fence he had leaned against to keep the wind from his stomach and genitals, his soft parts. If he was lucky and the ground was not frozen, the men who found him might drop him in a shallow grave. He’d seen that plenty. A shallow grave with a frozen foot sticking out. It made him laugh sometimes. There’s something funny about a foot poking out of the snow. A frozen hand was a different thing. You see that hand and you know someone had gone down hard, probably pleading at the last, begging for his mother, even in death. Yes, a hard death.

“Happy thoughts for a cold night,” he said aloud and wondered if the old woman next to him was still awake. She said nothing, and he couldn’t hear her breathing.

He wondered what kept her alive. The pig and her husband? Her duty to them? They were gone and wouldn’t come back. Maybe the husband would, but certainly not the pig. The way the old woman told that story, the German knew her husband didn’t have the strength to both pursue the pig and then bring it home. He was probably out there some place, pressed against a slight rise of earth, frozen and dead.

The German’s face felt stiff from the frost on his moustache and beard. He could feel the ice in his feet and his calves as well. It made him wonder if he would be able to walk far tomorrow, or whether he would be able to walk at all. Today, before he found the old woman’s hut, he had covered maybe ten kilometers, not enough to make him feel safe.

He leaned further into the old woman. His knees pressed against the back of her legs, his chest against her back. He felt that her old bones, her rags, her thin flesh must still have a little human warmth left in them to share with another. He tried to pull her even closer.

But where was the warmth? It was like Siberia in the hut.

______________

The above story originally appeared in the 2008 issue of the Ontario Review.

2010 Copyright John Guzlowski

Art in the Holocaust

2010-02-21T07:20:00.000-08:00

I've been invited to speak at the Art in the Holocaust Conference at Ferris State University, Big Rapids, Michigan.

Here's the list of events planned for this conference. Click on each topic for further information.

Art in the Holocaust Series

2/1-2/27

“Children of the Holocaust” Exhibit by Miriam Brysk

2/23

John Guzlowski: Poetry Reading

2/24

Art in the Holocaust Panel Presentation & Discussion

2/25

Miriam Brysk: “Children of the Holocaust” Artist Presentation

2/25

Helen Degen Cohen: Poetry Reading

______

The above painting is by Miriam Brysk.

The Poems of the Poles Who Were Taken to Siberia

2010-02-16T11:58:00.001-08:00

February marks the 70th anniversary of mass deportations of Poles to Soviet prison camps in Siberia and other places in the USSR. Some 155,000 Poles were forced to work and live under dangerous conditions. Of those deported, only about 8,000 ever returned to Poland after the war.

Halina Ablamowicz has translated -- along with Kevin Christianson -- poems written by the Poles who were taken to Siberia and collected them in a book entitled Polish Poetry from the Soviet Gulags.

She has allowed me to publish three of them here in both English and the original Polish:

TO MY FELLOW POLES/Anna Rudawcowa (Sybir 1941)

A wicked fate cast us onto the steppes of Kazakhstan
A wicked fate forced us into exile into a world
Where each heart is an open wound,
Where each moment lasts for years on end.
A ghastly train took us across rivers
And across the serrated range of the Urals,
Our Homeland’s smile -- sad and distant
Grew paler and paler, and finally went out.
Life caught us in its iron gears,
In its steel wheels, entangled us in silver rails.
A host of exiles cast into Sybir
For a grave sin that was not committed.
No need for tears! No need for words of grievances,
Because each complaint will grate on the ear. . .
Oh my fellow Poles! People without a Homeland!
The night shall pass, and after it dawn will come!

DO BRACI/Anna Rudawcowa (Sybir 1941)

Zły los rzucił nas w stepy Kazachstanu
Zły los nas wygnał na tułaczkę w świat,
Gdzie każde serce jest otwartą raną,
Gdzie każda chwila jest szeregiem lat.
Upiorny pociąg wiózł nas poprzez rzeki
I przez Uralskich gór zębaty pas,
Ojczyzny uśmiech- smutny i daleki
Bladł coraz bardziej, wreszcie zgasł.
Złapało życie w swe żelazne tryby,
W stalowe koła, sploty srebrnych szyn.
Wygnańców tłum, rzuconych tu na Sybir
Za ciężki grzech nie popełnionych win.
Nie trzeba łez! Nie trzeba slów ni wyznań,
Bo każda skarga zabrzmi tu jak zgrzyt. . .
O bracia moi! Ludzie bez Ojczyzny!
Przeminie noc, a po niej przyjdzie świt!

LONELY GRAVE/Zofia Metelicka

In far off Siberia there is a lonely grave
Flower blossoms lean over it
While the rustling of the steppe’s tall grasses
Brings the quiet sound of grief with the wind.

To look for a cross or a name would be in vain
Nobody remembers whose grave this is
Many years ago flowers were placed there
And a memory lived in minds and hearts.

Those who preserved the memory in their hearts
Have returned to their distant Homeland
But their happiness was not complete, for a part
Of their souls they left behind upon the steppe.

Every year always on that same November Day
When votive candles are lighted in cemeteries
In their thoughts and hearts they’ll be there at the grave
Even though the clock of time has obscured its image.

On a sunny summer day perhaps someone young
Will stop and place a small flower there
And in reflection send a sigh to God while whispering
A prayer in the wind’s hushed sound.

SAMOTNA MOGIŁA/Zofia Metelicka

W dalekiej Syberii samotna mogiła
Nad nią się chylą kwiatów kielichy
A szum wysokiej trawy stepowej
Niesie wraz z wiatrem żalu głos cichy.

Na próżno by szukać krzyża lub imenia
Nikt nie pamięta czyja to mogiła
Przed wielu latami składano tu kwiaty
I pamięć w sercach i umysłach żyła.

Ci co tę pamięć w sercach zachowali
Do swojej dalekiej Ojczyzny wrócili
Lecz niezupełnie byli szczęśliwi
Bo cząstkę swej duszy w stepie zostawili.

Zawsze co roku w dzień listopadowy
Kiedy zapłoną na cmentarzach znicze
Myślą i sercem będą tam przy grobie
Choć zegar czasu przesłonił oblicze.

Być może ktoś młody w letni dzień słoneczny
Przystanie i kwiatek położy w zadumie
A potem do Boga pośle westchnienie
Szepcząc modlitwę w cichym wiatru szumie.

APRIL 13/Anna Rudawcowa

On the night of April 13...The world collapsed
And a new completely different horrible world was born
When in darkness a brutal paw outstretched
Destroyed our nest – our family home.

A knock on the door... Clenched and cunning,
Importunate hands yank the doorknob…
A flash of consciousness: this is the end, the end!
A quiet prayer “Defend us, O Mother of God.”

Thud of heavy boots... A flashlight flickers
In the window and then goes away...
In their little beds the awakened children cry,
And their hearts pound, pound, like hammers.

This child’s eyes insane with fear − pale trembling lips, frantic!
A shout in Russian from the other side of the door:
“Open up! This is the Soviet government.”
And the thought: all’s lost…no use trying...we’re done for…!

Now they’re inside the apartment − smiling, polite,
But something lurks in the depths of their eyes
And the heart senses danger −
The intended blow will fall any second.

13 KWIECIEŃ/Anna Rudawcowa

Noc trzynastego kwietnia…Świat się zapadł
I powstał nowy, straszny, całkiem inny
Gdy wyciągnięta w mroku chamska łapa
Zburzyła gniazdo nasze – dom rodzinny.

Stukanie do drzwi…Natarczywe dłonie
Za klamkę szarpią chytre i spreżone…
Blask świadomości: to już koniec, koniec!
Modlitwa cicha “Pod Twoją Obronę.”

Łomot buciorów ciezkich …W okno świeci
Błyskiem latarki i odchodzi potem…
W łóżeczkach płaczą obudzone dzieci,
A serca biją, biją im jak młotem.

Te obłąkane strachem oczy dziecka,
Usteczka drżące, nieprzytomne, blade!
Za drzwiami okrzyk: ”Atkroj! Zdieś właść sowiecka!”
I myśl: skończone…trudno…nie ma rady!

Już są w mieszkaniu – uśmiechnięci, grzeczni
I tylko w oczach czai się coś na dnie,
A serce czuje, że jest niebezpiecznie –
Cios wymierzony lada chwila spadnie.

__________________________________________

Dr. Halina Ablamowicz is Professor of Speech Communication at Tennessee Tech University where she teaches courses in public speaking, persuasion, semiotics, intercultural and interpersonal communication. Her book Polish Poetry from the Soviet Gulags: Recovering a Lost Literature, published in 2008 by Edwin Mellon Press (USA), focuses on the horrific experiences of the Sybiracy -- the nearly two million innocent Poles who were deported by Stalin to Soviet gulags between 1940 and 1941. This book contains twenty-five poems written by Polish deportees translated into English in collaboration with Kevin Christianson.

She and Dr. Christianson collaborated on several other Polish -to-English translation projects including a bilingual edition of Andrzej Bursa’s poems-- Wybór Wierszy / Selected Poems published in 2008 by Art-Park (Poland). Their translated poetry have appeared in New Letters, The Formalist, The Minnesota Review, Damn the Caesars, The Sarmatian Review, New American Writing, Guernica, The Bitter Oleander, Home Planet News, Passport, Poetry International, The Ohio Review, Stand, and The London Magazine.

Valentine's Day: Why My Mom Stayed with My Dad

2010-02-10T12:19:00.000-08:00

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. The other is called The Wooden Trunk We Carried With Us From Germany.

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

Waiting to Be Heard: Lilka Croydon-Trzcinska

2010-02-01T08:35:00.000-08:00

In her book Waiting To Be Heard: The Polish Christian Experience Under Nazi and Stalinist Oppression 1939-1955, Bogusia Wojciechowska brings together the stories of many Poles who experienced Nazi and Stalinist brutality.

One of the most moving stories is that of Lilka Croydon-Trzcinska. She was still in high school when the Nazis invaded, and she and her sisters and brother joined the Polish Resistance. For her activities, the Nazis sent her first to Auschwitz and then to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. After the war, she wrote about her experiences in a book entitled The Labyrinth Of Dangerous Hours: A Memoir Of The Second World War (with a forward by historian Norman Davies).

Dr. Bogusia Wojciechowska has allowed me to post a video of part of her interview with Lilka Croydon-Trzcinska.

___________

To read my earlier post on Waiting to Be Heard click here.

The Stories of Four Poles

2009-12-21T11:50:00.000-08:00

The population of Poland was about 36,000,000 when the Nazis decided to destroy the country and its people. Six million of them died. The ones who didn't die lived unimaginable lives for decades and decades to come, first under the hammer of the Nazis and then under the hammer and sickle of the Communists.

Not all of them want to talk about what happened. Some Poles don't want to remember the killings, brutality, deportation, enslavement, deprivation, and suffering that many of them felt would never end. My mother was one of these Poles. If I asked her about what those years under the Nazis were like, she would wave me away and tell me simply, "If they give you bread, you eat it. If they beat you, you run away."

I respect the silence of those like my mother who wouldn't talk about those years. I'm sure she felt that she was protecting my sister Donna and me from the kind of sorrow few can bear.

Other Poles, however, were like my dad. He was a man who felt that it was his duty to let people know about the terrible things that were done. He didn't want people to forget the evil that came down upon the Poles.

Justine Jablonska, a graduate student in the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, recently published a series of reports about four Poles who, like my father, feel that they must keep the memories of what happened alive.

These reports are gathered together under the title "Four stories: The nurse, the child, the Resistance fighter and the Home Army soldier."

In this series of articles, Ms. Jablonska describes what happened to a 19-year old nurse who was deported to Siberia, a 7-year old boy who witnessed the collapse of Warsaw, a resistance fighter who was captured and sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau and Buchenwald, and a 16-year old who fought to free Poland during the Warsaw Uprising in 1944.

The stories these Poles tell are personal stories, human stories, that remind us finally that courage and hope, honor and faith, re-awaken in every generation and help to see us through.

You can read Ms. Jablonska's entire article online by clicking here.

__________________

Justine Jablonska is a graduate student at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. She is specializing in urban issues and global journalism. In her previous corporate life, she worked as an editor, writer, and project manager for various companies, including Skidmore, Owings & Merrill LLP, NASD, Humana, and Creative Powers Inc.

Her article about a veteran who fought in the Uprising as a very, very young boy is also online.

Happy Thanksgiving Day

2009-11-26T08:30:00.000-08:00

My people were all poor people, the ones who survived to look in my eyes and touch my fingers and those who didn’t, dying instead of fever, hunger, or even a bullet in the face, dying maybe thinking of how their deaths were balanced by my birth or one of the other stories the poor tell themselves to give themselves the strength to crawl out of their own graves.

Not all of them had this strength but enough of them did, so that I’m here and you’re here reading this blog about them.

What kept them going?
.
I think about that a lot.

Maybe there's something in the DNA of people who start with nothing and end with nothing, and in between live from one handful of nothing to the next handful of nothing.

They keep going.

Through the misery in the rain and the terror in the snow, they keep going--even when there aren’t any rungs on the ladder, even when there aren’t any ladders.

(The photos are of my uncle Jan Hanczarek. He was taken to Siberia by the Russians in 1941. The Russians enslaved millions of Poles. In the first photo, he is standing with his wife and two children. I don't know their names. In the second photo, he and his wife are standing at the grave of my grandmother and my aunt and my aunt's baby who were all killed by the Nazis.)

All Souls Day

2009-10-31T07:14:00.000-07:00

When I was a child growing up in Chicago, All Souls Day wasn't a big deal. My parents would tell me stories about what it was like in Poland when they were kids.

People, my mother would say, would walk to the cemeteries where their mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, were buried and leave fall flowers and lighted candles there. Some times at night, there would be so many candles burning on and near the graves that you could see the light shining above the cemeteries as you walked back home, even if your home was far away.

But we didn't do that in America. We were Displaced Persons, immigrants, and all our dead were buried far away in Poland. My mother didn't even know where her mother and her sister and her sister's baby were buried. The men who killed them put my mother on a boxcar and sent her to the slave labor camps in Germany before she could bury her family. It was a bad time.

A little while ago, the Polish-American poet Oriana Ivy sent me a poem about All Souls Day, and she said it would be okay to share it with people.

Here's the poem:

All Souls

Sometimes I think Warsaw fog
is the dead, come back

to seek their old homes –
wanting to touch even the walls.

But they cannot find those walls,
so they embrace the trees instead,

lindens and enduring chestnuts.
They embrace the whole city, lay

their arms around the bridges
and the droplet-beaded street lamps;

they pray in the Square of Three Crosses,
kneel among the candles and flowers

under bronze plaques that say
On this spot, 100 people were shot –

they bow, they kiss
even the railroad tracks –

they do not complain, only hold
what they can, in unraveling white.

-- Oriana Ivy

_______

_______

If you want to read more of Oriana's poems, they are available online at the journal qarttsiluni. She blogs about life and poetry at Oriana Poetry.

If you want to know more about Polish and Polish-American All Souls Day, Deacon Konicki's blog has a post about the way it is celebrated in Poland and Robert Strybel has a piece on the way the day is commemorated by Polish-Americans in the US.

By the way, the Polish-American community in Buffalo, NY, has organized an All Souls Day commemoration. There's an article about it in the Polish News.

_______

The photo is of an All Souls Day commemoration in Poland.

The Mermaid and the Messerschmitt: War Through a Woman's Eyes, 1939-1940

2009-10-06T16:19:00.000-07:00

I've been looking forward to this memoir by Rulka Langer for a very long time. It's the first publication of Aquila Polonica, a new press started by Terry Tegnazian and Stefan Mucha dedicated to publishing works about the Polish World War II experience in English. The press hopes to publish firsthand accounts, memoirs, poetry, literature, photographs, artwork and historical studies. Terry Tegnazian has written that what inspires her is Poland's role in World War II. It is, she says, "possibly the most heroic and tragic of all the Allies, yet remains one of the least-known aspects of WWII to those living in the West. It is our mission to bring this amazing story to the wider English-speaking world."

Aquila Polonica's The Mermaid and the Messerschmitt: War Through a Woman’s Eyes, 1939-1940 is a rare eyewitness account of the first six months of WWII – the Nazi German invasion of Poland, the Siege of Warsaw, and the first months of the Nazi occupation – written by Rulka Langer, a civilian, a young Polish career woman and mother, who was a graduate of Vassar College in the U.S.

Her story is enhanced by the historic photographs, documents, and maps that the publishers have gathered together especially for this volume.

The book has been chosen as a selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club, the History Book Club, and the Military Book Club, and is endorsed by Dr. Zbigniew Brzezinski. Publishers Weekly calls it “an unusual take on WWII.”

The recently retired head of the Los Angeles Public Library system read it and says: “I couldn’t put the book down. Her story is riveting … utterly contemporary and compelling.”

The Mermaid is available in hardcover at your local bookstore (if it’s not in stock, they can order it for you), or online at Amazon.com.

The Men From the East Were Terrible

2009-09-17T13:24:00.000-07:00

70 years ago today the Soviet Union invaded Poland from the east and divided up the country with the Nazis. In some places in Poland, they light candles and put them in the windows to remember the dead and the suffering of the living during that time.

My mother was living west of Lvov in eastern Poland when the Russians invaded. I once asked her what that time was like. She said, "The men from the east were terrible--like buffaloes."

Tonight in Danville, Virginia, where I live, I will light a candle.

Waiting to Be Heard: The Polish Christian Experience Under Nazi and Stalinist Oppression 1939-1955

2009-09-16T03:42:00.000-07:00

I first met Dr. Bogusia Wojciechowska over the internet about five years ago. Someone sent me a note about her and her work, and I got in touch with her as soon as I read it.

She was working on an extensive research project to document the lives of Poles who were forced to leave Poland during World War II. This was a project that touched me directly. For years, I've try to find books that would tell me more about what happened to people like my parents who had been rounded up by the Germans and taken to the slave labor and concentration camps in Germany. What I found surprised me. Beyond Richard C. Lukas's excellent Forgotten Holocaust there weren't many such books, and his book in fact didn't tell me what I wanted to know about the lives of the Poles who were taken to German and those -- like my Uncle Jan -- who were taken to Siberia.

It seemed that what my mom once said was true. They don't make books about people like us.

Dr. Wojciechowska's project has attempted to change that. Over the years, as a historian, she devoted herself to chronicling the experiences of those who were forced to leave Poland. Her website -- The Polish Diaspora -- has been an essential source of information about those experiences. Now, she has edited a book that brings together much of her research about the lives of those who were taken from Poland during the war.

The book is called Waiting to Be Heard: The Polish Christian Experience Under Nazi and Stalinist Oppression 1939-1955 .

If my mom were to see this book, she would probably say, "At last, here's a start."

Here's a press release from the publisher of Waiting to Be Heard:

Polish Christian survivors of WWII oppression

All wars disrupt; they leave behind the dead and the living, the victims and the survivors. The war that tore apart Poland in 1939 with Hitler’s avowed annihilation of an eastern neighbor "for German expansion", Stalin’s westward thrust with Soviet communism and the mass deportation to Siberia of whole societies, all ensured that while millions died, those who survived could not or would not speak of their ordeal. Theirs was the story of deprivation and of humiliation; it was the realization that not only was a homeland lost, but that an entire future was denied.

Waiting To Be Heard (The Polish Christian Experience Under Nazi and Stalinist Oppression 1939-1955) is an attempt to give voice to those who, in fear of their lives or in anticipation of an eventual and triumphant return, found themselves exiled across the world. Dr. Bogusia Wojciechowska, the daughter of a couple that found refuge in a camp outside Oxford, England, and now Dean at Bunker Hill Community College in Boston MA, had an incomplete picture of her family’s plight until she chanced upon some letters written by her grandfather. Her training as a historian gave her the confidence and the methodology to conduct over one hundred interviews with a rapidly decreasing population that had first-hand experience of both Nazi and Stalinist oppression. In the majority of cases these interviews were the first time this diaspora had spoken at length about their suffering and their determination to secure freedom for their homeland.

Presented as a series of vignettes, Waiting to Be Heard is a chronology punctuated by the poetry of a subsequent generation that includes Martin Stepek, John Guzlowski, and Hania Kaczanowska, each of whom pay respectful and heart-rending homage to the dignity of their parents. This 400-page book contains many photographs and artifacts, and has a foreword by Ryszard Kaczorowski, former president of the Polish Government-in-Exile in London who, in 1990, was finally able to hand over the safeguarded State Insignia to the newly and democratically-elected president, Lech Walesa, in Warszawa.

Published this September, by AuthorHouse, Waiting To Be Heard is printed to order, so wait times may vary. Please order through Amazon, and Barnes & Noble websites, or through your local bookstore. Meanwhile, one can get a feel for the content by visiting www.PolishDiaspora.com. The ISBN is 978-1-4490-1370-7

For additional information, write to: WaitingToBeHeard(at)comcast.net -- substitue @ for (at).

Poland to Buffalo Through World War II

2009-09-14T10:48:00.000-07:00

I recently received the following information regarding the upcoming conference (Oct. 3-4) sponsored by the Andy Golebiowski and the Polish Legacy Project of Buffalo, NY:

Untold Stories Come Alive

This year marks the 70th anniversary of the invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union; the start of WWII. The war exacted an enormous physical and human toll. Apart from the millions of dead, millions others became displaced from their homes. Many of these displaced persons found a home outside of their homeland, in England, Australia and North America, in places like Toronto and Buffalo. Since settling here, these immigrants quietly built new lives, worked hard and generally kept silent about what they had experienced.

Conscious of the fact that many of the survivors have died, taking their stories to their graves forever, the Polish Legacy Project in Buffalo-WWII was formed with the aim of documenting the stories of those who are still among us. Feeling a sense of urgency, we have set out to capture these stories in order to share them with the community at large.

The conference is the beginning of a larger project aimed at documenting Polish stories of wartime survival.

_____

For more information, including registration forms, conference schedule, and list of speakers, please refer to the Polish Legacy Project website.

Schedule for Polish Mission World War II Commemoration--Schedule

2009-08-04T07:43:00.000-07:00

Further information -- including free registration information -- may be found by clicking here.

Here's the schedule:

It All Began in Poland
World War II Commemoration

The Polish Mission of the Orchard Lake Schools
SS. Cyril & Methodius Seminary
& Michigan Polonia, LLC

3535 Indian Trail
Orchard Lake, Michigan
248-683-0412

Tuesday, September 1, 2009

6:00 PM Sunset Wypominki & Candle Service at the Grotto of Our Lady of Lourdes
Mass follows in the Shrine Chapel

September 5 - 6, 2009

We are honored to have Mr. Zygmunt Matynia, Consul General of the Republic of Poland (Chicago) with us for the events on Saturday and Sunday.

Throughout the weekend there will be ongoing activities including:

Batilion Burza a living history re-enactment group of Polish & American military men and women.

Assembling a Time Capsule - Collection of WWII and commemoration materials to be opened in 2039, the Time Capsule will be registered with the Smithsonian Institute.

Personalization of Pewabic Memorial Tiles with signatures of Polish Veterans and Displaced Persons, and Księga Pamiątkowa - Guest Book Signing

Saturday, September 5, 2009

10:00 - 11:30

Reunion with Sybiracy - Polish Refugees

Antoni Walawender MA, speaks of his personal experience as a “Chlopcy z Polski”
Photo history of the Sybiracy experience including Siberia, Iran, India, South Africa, and Mexico and the launch of the oral history website

Selected Interviews with Survivors of German work camps

Poet John Guzlowski PhD, reads his poetry and explains the symbolism

11:30 - 12:15 Lunch

12:15 - 2:15

Opening of the Art Exhibition

Peggy Grant, BFA presents the History and Symbolism of Artist Adam Grochowski

Cecile Wendt Jensen, MA presents the History and Symbolism of Artist Jan Komski

Polish Photographer Marcin Chumiecki speaks about his Assignment Auschwitz Portfolio

2:15 - 2:30 Break

2:30 - 3:30

Guy Stern PhD, Director of the Holocaust Museum and Director of the International Institute of Righteous, pays tribute to the Polish Catholics who risked their lives to save Jews during World War II and Sue Krolikowski PhD pays tribute to the Polish Catholic nuns who sheltered Jewish children.

3:30 – 3:45 Break

3:45 – 4:45

Poet John Guzlowski PhD discusses his work Lightening and Ashes and Third Winter of War: Buchenwald

7:00

Polish Evening Concert in the Shrine Chapel with Curtis Posuniak, organist at St. Patrick Church in Carleton, Michigan.

Sunday, September 6, 2009

1:00 - 2:00

Mass at the Shrine Chapel to honor the Polish Army Veterans and Camp Survivors

Poet John Guzlowski addresses veterans

2:00 – 3:00

The Filarets Chorus, led by David Troiano, presents a repertory of patriotic and military songs for the Veterans

3:00 - 3:15

Group Photo of Veterans

3:15 - 4:15

William Krul, President, Polish Genealogical Society of Michigan, outlines the required governmental steps he took to obtain the proper military recognition for his father William Krul, Sr. who died in combat during WWII.

4:15 – 4:30 Break

4:30 – 5:30

Hands on training to retrieve U.S. military, refugee, and naturalization documents via the ancestry.com database and documents via the Kresy-Siberia website.
Adam Cardinal Maida Library.

This project is funded in part by Michigan Humanities Council, an affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

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To see posters and a youtube regarding the commemoration, please click here.

I have also posted a blog about Sept. 1 with some films of the invasion and memories of my father's stories about it. Click here.

Sept. 1, 1939: Commemoration

2009-07-23T10:01:00.000-07:00

This September 1st marks the 70th anniversary of the Nazi invasion of Poland. This invasion and the subsequent invasion by their Soviet allies almost destroyed Poland. According to some historians, one out of six Poles died in the ensuing struggle.

The Polish Mission of the Orchard Lakes Schools, SS. Cyril and Methodius Seminary, and Michigan Polonia have organized a commemorative event for the first week of September. The event will allow those who witnessed World War II in Poland to share their memories with others. I'm honored to have been asked to be one of the speakers.

Further information about the commemoration is available at The Polish Mission site. You can also contact Ceil Wendt Jensen at ceil(at)polishmission.com [substitute @ for (at)].

_____

Last year, I posted a blog about Sept. 1 and what it means to me. The blog also features 3 youtube videos about the Nazi invasion. You can see all of that by clicking here.

Scholar Jan Peczkis has compiled a list of books about the Nazi and Soviet invasion of Poland. The list and Mr. Peczkis' comments on the individual books are available at the Amazon site.

Happy Father's Day

2009-06-19T08:29:00.000-07:00

My father was probably the hardest working man I knew.

When I was a kid he would work double shifts, 16 hour days, and some years he wouldn't take vacations because the bosses at the factory where he worked would pay him double time. They would give him his vacation pay, and they would give him the week's salary on top of that.

Double time. He loved earning double time. He'd laugh and say it was one of the best things about America. Like getting something for nothing.

When he wasn't working at the factory, he was working around the house. Five years after coming to America, my parents bought a five-unit apartment building. Nine years after coming to America, they sold that one and bought a six unit on Evergreen Street in Chicago. My dad--and my mom--were always working on these buildings to maintain them and spruce them up. They plastered ceilings, painted walls, and stripped and varnished floors. When he wasn't doing that kind of work, he would be outside chopping wood to feed the massive furnace we had in the basement, or he'd be in one of the apartments with his pliers and hammer working on a leak. He didn't know a thing about pipes, but he was sure that sweat and hard work could fix them.

He was always like this.

Toward the end of his life when he was dying of cancer, he was still hauling new orange trees -- with their roots bundled up in burlap -- into the back yard and trying to plant them. Sometimes he just couldn't do it, didn't have the strength to stand up, and he would ask me to help. He'd sit on a chair in the backyard, trying to breathe and pointing to a spot where he had lugged the orange tree.

"Plant it there, Johnny," he'd say in Polish. "Plant it there."

Sometimes, he'd have so little breath that the words would be a whisper. You know what I mean.

Here's a poem about my dad and why he worked so hard. It's part of a sequence of poems about his working that appears in my book about him and my mom, Lightning and Ashes:

From "Looking for Work in America"

What My Father Brought With Him

He knew death the way a blind man
knows his mother’s voice. He had walked
through villages in Poland and Germany

where only the old were left to search
for oats in the fields or beg the soldiers
for a cup of milk. He knew the dead,

the way they smelled and their dark full faces,
the clack of their teeth when they were desperate
to tell you of their lives. Once he watched

a woman in the moments before she died
take a stick and try to write her name
in the mud where she lay. He’d buried

children too, and he knew he could do any kind
of work a man could ask him to do.
He knew there was only work or death.

He could dig up beets and drag fallen trees
without bread or hope. The war taught him how.
He came to the States with this and his tools,

hands that had worked bricks and frozen mud
and knew the language the shit bosses spoke.

__

The Courageous Heart of Irena Sendler

2009-04-14T08:14:00.000-07:00

Irena Sendler was a Polish woman, a social worker, who, in the middle of World War II, in the middle of the worst killing in a country where the Germans would kill you if you tried to help a Jew, decided to save Jewish children trapped in the Warsaw Ghetto.

She couldn't save all of them. There were too many and the Germans were killing them too fast, but somehow she and her friends in the Polish Underground were able to save 2,500 Jewish Children.

This Sunday, April 19, CBS is showing a movie about her called The Courageous Heart of Irena Sendler.

You can also learn more about her by visiting a website started by a group of school children in Kansas to keep alive the memory of what she did. Their project is called Life in a Jar, and its name comes from something Irena Sendler did so that eventually after the war the Jewish children she saved could know who they were. She made lists of the children's real names and put the lists in jars, then buried the jars in a garden, so that someday she could dig up the jars and find the children to tell them of their real identity.

Here's a short video about how the Kansas school children found out about Irena Sendler:

To learm more about Irene Sendler, I recommend the following cite, dedicated to making a documentary about her and the Poles who worked with her: In the Name of their Mothers: The Story of Irene Sendler. The film includes some of the last interviews she gave.

Remembering Katyn

2009-03-30T13:46:00.000-07:00

I recently received an email from the artist Carolyn Bardos. We were exchanging notes about my parents and their experiences in the war, and Ms. Bardos mentioned that she had seen Andrzej Wajda's motion picture KATYN in Budapest.

This is what she wrote:

What I recall so clearly is the audience, as the credits rolled, sitting in profound silence, until the crying started. A few people were standing, as if to leave, but they just stood. It was a small theater, and after the credits, the projectionist left off the lights to give the weeping audience time to dry our eyes, switch the cell phones back on, and walk back out into the city.

____________

Please visit the website of The Katyn Memorial in Baltimore.

____________

Last year at this time, I posted a blog about my father and what he told me about Katyn. I'm posting it again this year:

KATYN: THE FOREST OF DEATH

April is the month when many of the killings at Katyn Forest took place during World War II. Poles try to remember this every year, and I've been thinking about Katyn recently. I've been thinking about Katyn and my father.

When I was a child, he told me a lot of stories about what happened in the war, about things that happened to my mother's family and his family and to Poland. One of the stories that he came back to repeatedly was about what happened in the Katyn Forest near the Russian town of Smolensk in 1940.
.

He told me about how the Soviets took 15,000-20,000 Polish Army officers and killed them. Nobody knows the number for certain.

My father used to say, "It's hard to count bones."
.

These soldiers were mainly reservists; that means they weren't professional soldiers, just civilian soldiers. In their daily lives, they were doctors and lawyers, teachers and priests. My father used to say that they were the future of Poland. He said that the Soviets didn't want Poland to have a future, so they took these doctors and lawyers, scientists and librarians and tied them up and blindfolded them and shot them in the back of the head. They were buried in mass graves.

One of the things he also told me was that people knew about this, countries likes the US and England knew about this, and nobody did anything about it. The Soviets, of course, denied it, and so did other countries. They didn't want to bring it up. I guess they figured what was the point of talking about massacres and genocide.

My father never wanted me to forget about Katyn.

Years ago, I wrote a poem about it for my book Lightning and Ashes, and I want to share the poem with you on this 68th anniversary of the Katyn Massacre.

KATYN

There are no Great Walls there,

No towers leaning or not leaning

Declaring some king's success

Or mocking another's failure,

No gleaming cathedral where you can

Pray for forgiveness or watch

The cycle of shadows play
Through the coolness of the day,

And soon not even the names

Of those who died will be remembered

(Names like Skrzypinski, Chmura,

Or Anthony Milczarek).

Their harsh voices and tearing courage

Are already lost in the wind,

But their true monuments

Will always be there, in the dust

And the gray ashes and the mounds

Settling over the bodies over which

No prayers were ever whispered,

No tears shed by a grieving mother

Or a trembling sister.

______________________________________

Here's a trailer for the Oscar-nominated film KATYN by Andrzej Wajda.

My Parents and Happy Places

2009-02-20T13:41:00.000-08:00

Recently, SGI Quarterly, a Buddhist magazine devoted to Peace, Culture, and Education, asked me to write a piece about my mom and dad and what they -- as concentration camp survivors -- were like as parents for a special issue of the magazine devoted to parents and children.

At first, it was hard to think of my parents as parenting role models. My mom and dad had gone through years of slave labor in Nazi Germany's camps, and the experience left them with traumas they never were able to shake. In one of my new poems called "The Evil that Men Do," I write half jokingly about how as a kid I sometimes thought that my mother had learned her parenting skills from Nazi guards.

I didn't think I could write the article. But then I did. Here's the article:

My father was a man plagued by nightmares about the Nazi concentration camps he and my mother both spent years in. When I was a child, his screams would wake us all. I don't think I've ever heard screams like that. They were muffled in an odd way. Screams, in my experience, are usually accompanied by an explosion of air. My father's nightmare screams were drawn in. Even in his sleep, it was almost like he was afraid to scream. I would come to my father's bedroom, and he would be asleep and screaming and struggling with the Nazi guards who were beating him. He drank all the time to keep these nightmares back.

My mother's experiences in the camps showed themselves in a different way. She was afraid of so many things, loud noises, whistling, even clowns she saw on TV; and she was especially afraid of things being done incorrectly. She would beat and scold all of us, even my father, if the table was set the wrong way for dinner or if we came home late after an outing. My sister and I often thought that our parents were crazy; our lives amid the screaming and fear and anger just didn't make sense.

But despite all of this, I now realize that my parents wanted so hard to give us happiness. And when I think about my childhood, I think about the happy times my parents tried to give us, and I think about the special places where these happy times took place.

For me, the most important of these moments took place on the June day I turned four years old, a Sunday in 1952, when I ran to the garden in the back of a little house we were renting in Chicago and stood there among Black-eyed Susans with their yellow petals and long, thin necks. And my mother in a white dress with little blue flowers sat in the garden between me and my sister, and my father stood in front of us with a Brownie Cadet box camera.

He was asking us to smile in the Polish we still spoke at home, while my mother told me about the day ahead, how we would go to Kiddie Land, an elaborate children's playground, and my sister Danusha and I would ride on the blue and yellow and red cars and the roller coaster built just for kids. My mother made it sound like there was something special about being a kid the way she talked about the day we had planned.

It makes a picture I don't want to forget.

I think we all have such special perfect places, happy places where we feel most ourselves, most comfortable. Maybe we remember these special places and special times and turn to them because they were the places and times our parents were happy, before their lives took their inevitable turns. Maybe not. Like most of us, I'm not good at figuring out the complex why of things.

But I remember that particular Sunday morning when I was four, and you remember sitting at a baseball game between your mother and father, and both are yelling at one of the players in a way that frightens you just a little but you know is okay; or you remember a day when your parents took you swimming and your mother was laughing at your father because he was wearing her bathing cap pulled down over his eyes in a silly way; or you remember your father sitting at the piano with a cigarette between his lips, playing some slow, sad piece you loved so much while, in another room, watching and listening, your mother stood washing some dinner plates or ironing some clothes.

_____________________
To see the entire issue of SGI devoted to Parents and Children just click here.

World War II Through Polish Eyes

2009-01-17T09:28:00.000-08:00

I recently heard from my friend Halina Koralewski, a Polish-American interested in making sure Americans know about Polish and Polish-American history. She told me that that she had just read a book called World War II Through Polish Eyes, and she wanted to recommend the book. It sounded interesting, and I asked her to write a piece about it for this blog so that others could hear about this book.

Here's what she wrote:

I just read the best book ever on Polish history, by M. B. Szonert - World War II Through Polish Eyes – a history of one Polish family (as well as the nation) before and during the war. What a great, great book. The family lost their relatives in the east, due to the Russian attack (which resulted in the deportation of Poles deep into Russia and Siberia).

After the war this part of Poland (almost ½ of its prewar land) was annexed to Russia and forever lost.

The boyfriend of Danusia (the protagonist in the book), a young Polish officer, was captured by the Russians in September of 1939. A couple of months later, in April 1940, he was executed along with 4,100 fellow Polish officers and 11,000 Polish government/administration officials, who were Poland's intellectual elite. These murders were all done on Stalin’s orders, and carried out by the NKVD (currently KGB), the infamous Soviet Secret police. The burial place of thousands of other Polish officers, also executed in 1940 by the Russians, is still unknown. This crime was never put to trial.

Also covered in the book is the Warsaw Uprising of August 1944, which is undoubtedly one of Poland's most heroic events, yet only a few lonely souls know of it. The Russian Army was on the other side of the Vistula River and didn’t help, while the Germans methodically suppressed the uprising, destroyed Warsaw, and murdered its citizens.

Another event is the battle of Monte Cassino – won by the Poles' famed Second Corpus after all other attempts by the Allied forces had failed. Roughly 1100 Polish soldiers lost their lives in this famous battle.

When the war ended, for Poland it was only the changing of an oppressor - from Germany to Russia. Although Poland fought Germany together with Allied forces, the West gave in to Stalin's demands and sacrificed Poland. Our best patriots, the Home Army fighters, were treated like criminals and executed by Russians. Russia in fact brought from Moscow their own puppet government that was never accepted by the majority of Poles. This terror continued until the Solidarity movement was born and eventually brought down communism.

What is both interesting and disturbing is that you will never find any of these facts in American history school textbooks.

In this particular book the family went through all the stages of Poland's troubled 20th century history and loses everything - only one family and so much suffering. A great, mind-opening book to read.

Poland was the only country in German-occupied Europe where there was an ultimate sacrifice - a death-sentence for helping Jews. Germans would kill Jews and Poles on the spot.

Nevertheless many Polish families helped their Jewish neighbors to survive in hiding. In Yad Vashem, where a tree is planted for each saved Jew, over 80% is attributed to the Poles, who were risking their own lives. Who indeed knows about it?

Poland's history and present is about forgiveness – yet how much can one nation forgive?

Ultimate Meaning in the Universe?

2009-01-17T09:01:00.000-08:00

I gave a lecture recently at Benedictine Academy, a Catholic girls’ school, in Elizabeth, New Jersey. I talked about my parents there and what they went through in the concentration camps during the war and what their lives were like after the war. Near the end of my presentation, I read a poem that I posted recently on OpenSalon. The poem is called "What The War Taught Her"; and it’s a bleak poem.

One of the things it talks about is my mother’s sense that all of the suffering she and the other people in the camps experienced was finally “worthless.” She believed that none of it did anybody any good. During the question and answer period afterward, one of the high school girls asked me if what happened to my parents strengthened my faith or weakened it.

It's a question that I think about all the time, but when you’re standing in front of a couple hundred young people and you know they have to get to their next class and that nobody’s got time for the long answer, you give them the short answer. That’s what I did. I told that student that I didn’t have any faith.

I’ll never see that student again, and I’ll probably never get to Benedictine Academy again, but I wish I could. It would give me the chance to give that student the long answer, and here’s what I’d say:

When I posted “What the War Taught My Mother” at OpenSalon, one of the bloggers, Laurel, Not Lauren, asked me a similar question about my faith. She said, "Tell me, in sifting through the rubble of so much evil and misery, have you come away with a sense that life has ultimate meaning, or are you a nihilist?"

“The ultimate meaning?”

When I look at the kinds of things that have happened and continue to happen, I have to wonder if there is an "ultimate meaning" and if that ultimate meaning is a good thing.

I came across a quotation by the Chicago novelist and Nobel prize winner Saul Bellow a while ago, and he seems to express for me the dark vision of that ultimate meaning. Here's what he says:

“You think history is the history of loving hearts? You fool! Look at these millions of dead. Can you pity them? Feel for them? You can do nothing! There were too many. We burned them to ashes, we buried them with bulldozers. History is the history of cruelty, not love, as soft men think. We have experimented with every human capacity to see which is strong and admirable and have shown that none is. There is only practicality. If the old God exists, he must be a murderer. But the one true god is Death and history is made by madmen and butchers.”

When I read that, I think that maybe the ultimate meaning is that you and I and billions of others should be dead and the sooner the better. The ultimate meaning is that the only meaning is that we are here for a brief moment and it doesn't matter whether we suffer or not.

I consider that, and then I consider what my father and mother felt. My dad spent four years in a concentration camp, and he came out of that experience thinking that he had an obligation to be kind and helpful. I've written about this in my poem "What My Father Believed." You can hear Garrison Kellior read it online.

My mother, on the other hand, was a skeptic and a cynic. 100% of the time when I would ask her if there was some kind of ultimate meaning in the universe (and you can be certain I did ask) she would say, "No priest has ever come back from heaven to tell me if what the church says is true."

Despite this, she had a spoonful of optimism in her--A hopefulness that kept her going past the deaths she witnessed in the war, past the suffering in the camps, past two cancers that left her crippled for the last 4 years of her life.

When I once asked her after her second surgery for cancer how she could go on, she said, "Optimism is a crazy person's mother."

I think that optimism is my mother too.

Buchenwald: The Work He Did

2008-12-07T07:59:00.000-08:00

When my father was dying of liver cancer, the doctors popped him full of morphine, enough morphine -- they thought -- to keep him drifting peacefully toward his death, but the morphine wasn't enough. Nothing was enough to make him forget what it was like in the concentration camp at Buchenwald. He had spent 4 years there, a place where every year one out of every four of the prisoners was worked to death.

Dying and drugged up in 1997, he was back in the camps, starving and struggling to keep alive. He was convinced that the doctors and nurses were Nazi guards. He was also sure that my mother and I had betrayed him to the guards. There was nothing we could say to make him realize the war was over and he wasn't working in the camp and that there was no reason to be afraid.

He was still afraid.

Let me tell you one of the stories he told me about working in Buchenwald:

I lifted the shovel, saw the dirt, the clods still heavy with snow, and I knew that this would always be my life, one shovel and then another shovel until my arms were shaking. I never knew what the guards would say to me.

Maybe they’d ask me for a song, one of the songs I knew in Poland that I sang when I was a boy leading the steaming cows into the woods early in the spring. And I would smile and sing, and then I would ask the guards if they’d like another song.

Or maybe they would tell me I was a fool and my mother was the kind of pig the farm boys fucked when their own hands were weak from pulling on their sore meat.

And I would shovel in terror and think of the words I would not say but wanted to say:

Sirs, we are all brothers, and if this war ever ends, please, never tell your children what you’ve done to me today.

____

(This posting first appeared at Living in Partial Light, my OpenSalon blog. You can read other stories about the work my father and mother did in Germany in my book Lightning and Ashes.)

Happy Thanksgiving Day

2008-11-28T20:51:00.001-08:00

Last year, I posted the following. I wanted to thank all my generations and generations of Polish ancestors who simply kept going despite all the misery and grief they faced.

My people were all poor people, the ones who survived to look in my eyes and touch my fingers and those who didn’t, dying instead of fever, hunger, or even a bullet in the face, dying maybe thinking of how their deaths were balanced by my birth or one of the other stories the poor tell themselves to give themselves the strength to crawl out of their own graves.

Not all of them had this strength but enough of them did, so that I’m here and you’re here reading this blog about them.

What kept them going?
.
I think about that a lot.

Maybe there's something in the DNA of people who start with nothing and end with nothing, and in between live from one handful of nothing to the next handful of nothing.

They keep going.

Through the misery in the rain and the terror in the snow, they keep going--even when there aren’t any rungs on the ladder, even when there aren’t any ladders.

(The photos are of my uncle Jan Hanczarek. He was taken to Siberia by the Russians in 1941. The Russians enslaved millions of Poles. In the first photo, he is standing with his wife and two children. I don't know their names. In the second photo, he and his wife are standing at the grave of my grandmother and my aunt and my aunt's baby who were all killed by the Nazis.)

Grieving

2008-11-07T07:35:00.000-08:00

Andy Golebiowski sent me an article from the Am Pol Eagle entitled "WWII Survivors, Families Commemorate All Souls Day." Here's the picture by photographer Peter Sloane that accompanied the piece:

It brought back a lot of memories. All Souls Day was always a holy day that I felt deeply. In Poland the day was important. People would take candles and flowers and visit the cemeteries where their family and friends were buried. They would say prayers for the souls of their mothers and fathers, their grandfathers and grandmothers, the children who had died.

It was different in America. My parents had lost so many of their family members and friends, but there were no cemeteries we could visit to find their graves. The loved ones my parents lost were buried in Germany and in Poland, even in Russia. They were buried in graves my parents would never see again, and some of those graves no one would ever see. They were unmarked, lost. Sometimes, people had died where they stood, and their bodies were left there by the Germans or the Russians.

My parents didn't visit cemeteries on All Soul's day, but they did grieve. There was a heavy leaden grayness that hung over everything that day, and not all the candy I had collected on Halloween could lighten it.

Here's a poem from Lightning and Ashes about my mother's grief. It's about when she was taken to Germany by the Nazis and left behind her dead mother and dead sister and her dead sister's baby.

Grief

My mother cried for a week, first in the boxcars
then in the camps. Her friends said, “Tekla,
don’t cry, the Germans will shoot you
and leave you in the field,” but she couldn’t stop.

Even when she had no more tears, she cried,
cried the way a dog will gulp for air
when it’s choking on a stick or some bone
it’s dug up in a garden and swallowed.

The woman in charge gave her a cold look
and knocked her down with her fist like a man,
and then told her if she didn’t stop crying
she would call the guard to stop her crying.

But my mother couldn’t stop. The howling
was something loose in her nothing could stop.

Language and Loss: Some More Thoughts

2008-10-08T12:22:00.000-07:00

A couple of weeks ago I posted a blog about language and loss. It was inspired by a conversation I have been having with Christina Sanantonio, a writer and blogger living in Central Illinois. She wrote about how difficult it was to talk about loss. Many of the things she said hit home with me, but one of the things was especially important. She said, "We ache for a language that doesn't exist."

Just a few days ago, I received an email from Wanda with her thoughts on memory, language, writing, and loss. Her letter continues the discussion Christina and I and the people who have written comments on my earlier post have been having. Wanda has an insight and clarity that has me thinking again about language and loss.

Here's her letter:

I remember something I read in Out of the Silent Planet by C.S Lewis when I was about 16. It was about how events remain incomplete until we remember them. It is our memory which draws the essential truth from an event, and the telling of it closes a circle. Other circles may be born from the event as we recall different aspects of it, as we grow older and gain more perspective, but as soon as we tell it -- whether speaking, writing, or merely naming it in our own minds -- it closes a circle. It becomes complete. And separate unto itself. Another loss.

Feeling the pain of loss is a silver thread which continues to unite us with the loved one who has died, so there's often a subconscious, or even conscious, reluctance to actively do things which would alleviate the pain. Even though we know it might "be better" to talk about the loss, to write about it, paint it, whatever, I think we also know deep down that once we do so and let some of the pain move out from us, borne by the flow of expression and received in witness by another, that something in us will be subtly and irreparably different. Even if we come out "better" for it, we still mourn the way we were mourning because in that way we had a certain connection with our loved one. Now, that connection is different. Stepping into the "now," we have to step off the shore of the "then." It's a bittersweet thing.

As my aunt and my father were dying between November and March this year, I - like you - kept note of everything I could. I even got my dad to draw or write something in a small sketchbook every day that he could. He’d draw his house in Poland, the storks, faces, chickens, and flowers. Day by day they changed a bit, and when the drawings deteriorated along with his presence, they became such mournful treasures. My aunt shared her dreams with me until one day, about three days before she died, she just said "There is so much I have that I'd like to share with you, but I'm not going to because if I do, I won't have it anymore." With both my aunt and my father, our manner of communication changed -- somehow more intimate while the space between our worlds grew ever larger.

One of the things which kept me going was knowing that I would write and paint about their dying. I've often wanted to share the poems and the painting, but I find it strange that I don't seem to be able to. Not even my siblings have read them. Still, I know that certain lines and poems of yours have resonated to the core with me...painful, but helpful. And some of Martin Stepek's are the same...I cry each time I read them, but it's good to read them. So it's by some kind of grace that our pain can move out from within us on waves of words, ripple out to spark healing in others. And the old wisdom of ancient healers has always said that what you put out into the world shall return sevenfold to you.

Is the healing in movement? in sharing? in knowing? Holding only helps for a while...the universe is movement, and as we are part of that I would have to say that movement is important for life and healing and yes for the dying too.

The poems about your mom's dying will come when it's time. But even when you write about not being able to write them, it means a lot to those of us who read that.

Language and Loss

2008-10-01T12:19:00.000-07:00

My friend the writer Christina Sanantonio and I have been having a conversation about writing about loss. It’s a conversation fueled in part by the recent suicide of the novelist David Foster Wallace. She wrote me a long letter about how we use or don’t use language to talk about loss, and about how hard it is to write about loss.

One of the things in her letter that really resonated with me was something she said about Primo Levi, the Holocaust survivor and writer who, like 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 we needed a new kind of language to talk about what happened there. Christina wrote that we ache for a language that doesn’t exist.

I’ve spent the last 30 years trying to find words to describe what happened to my parents in the concentration and slave labor camps and what those experiences made me feel. I write about this event or that image; and no matter how powerful the original event described by my mother or father I can’t really describe it, explain it, bring it out of the past. I can’t bring it out of memory into this life. I’m left pushing around some words, trying to make myself feel what I felt the first time I heard that story when I was a child. Sometimes I think I almost succeed; most of the time I know I’m not even close.

For me the poems that work best are the ones with my parents’ actual words. Those words are the real thing. My mother says to me, “If they give you bread, you eat it. If they beat you, you run”; or my dad tells me what he said to the German guards who beat him and tormented him, “Please, sirs, don’t ever 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 at some of the poetry readings I’ve given. A person stands up at the end of the reading when I invite questions, and he doesn’t say anything. He just stands there. I don’t know if the person even has a question. Maybe he just wants to show how much he feels my parents’ lives; or maybe the loss I talk about somehow reminds him of a loss he experienced and couldn’t talk about and still can’t talk about.

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. It 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 some times other people fail us. They can’t bring themselves to listen to our stories of loss. It’s hard to take on that burden.

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 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.

No matter how hard it is to tell someone something, 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.

September 1, 1939

2008-08-06T17:59:00.000-07:00

69 years ago on September 1. 1939, the Germans invaded Poland. Their blitzkrieg, their lightning war, came from the air and the sea and the sky. By Sept 28, Warsaw, the capital city of Poland, gave up. By October 7, the last Polish resistance inside Poland ended.

Recently, I received an email from a friend passing on some links to US Army films of the invasion of Poland that were compiled from captured German films. I thought I would share these films of what the Blitzkrieg was like. They are in 3 parts (each about six minutes); and if you click on the part you want to see, you will be taken to the appropriate site.

Invasion of Poland, Part I

Invasion of Poland, Part II

Invasion of Poland, Part III

The world had not seen anything like it, and it was the prelude to a lot of things the world had never seen before: the Final Solution, Total War, the concentration camps, the atomic bomb, the fire bombing of civilian populations, and brutality on a level that most people still don't want to think about almost 70 years later.

When the Germans attacked on that September 1, My dad was 19 and working on his uncle's farm with his brother Roman. Their parents had died when the boys were young, and their uncle and aunt took them in and taught them how to farm, how to prepare the soil in the fall and plant the seeds in the spring. My mom was 17 and living with her parents and her sisters and brothers in a forest west of Lvov in eastern Poland.

The summer had been hot and dry, and both of my parents, like so many other Poles, were looking forward to the fall and the beginning of milder weather.

The war turned my parents' lives upside down. Nothing they planned or anticipated could have prepared them for what happened.

By the end of the war, they were both slave laborers in Nazi Germany, their homes destroyed, their families dead or scattered, their country taken over by the Soviet Union.

DPcamps.Org and We Were Children

2008-07-02T17:17:00.000-07:00

I don't often recommend websites, but I want to share two with you.

The first is We Were Children.

I recently heard from Alexandra Gibson about this website. It's dedicated to helping child victims of World War II reunite with their families. The site is beautifully and simply constructed, and at present focuses on the story of Alexandra who as a child was separated from her father. She writes about her search for her father in her memoir(written under the name Alexandra Tesluk) Ashes of Innocence and in it she credits another website with helping her search.

That website is Olga Kaczmar's great DPcamps.Org.

For the last eight years, she has maintained a site that is the best place on or offline to get information about the DP camps. I'm a frequent visitor at this site, and I've always found it a place that is informative and inspiring and often heartbreaking. Much of what I have come to know about DPs I learned at this site.

There's a fine article by Jim Walker about Olga and the work she's done helping former DPs reunite with their families at The Santa Clarita Valley Signal.

I recommend both of these websites to anyone interested in the lives of DPs.

May 3rd Polish Constitution Day, Update

2008-06-04T12:10:00.000-07:00

I got an email from a friend after my last post. He wanted to know how my father celebrated May 3rd, Polish Constitution Day.

Here's what I wrote my friend:

My dad celebrated by going to the big Polish parade in Humboldt Park. The parade wound through the park, and it always seemed like every Polish-American Boy Scout troop and civic organization and parish was represented. Some of the groups had floats, but most were just Poles walking dressed in Red and White, the Polish colors, or costumes from the old country.

The parade wound through the park and finally ended up at the statue of Thaddeus Kosciusko, a Polish hero of the American Revolution. That's where people would come to hear speeches. And these were big deal speeches by big shots!

It seems like I heard Bobby Kennedy one year and Walter Mondale the next. Senator Muskie and LBJ? Yeah, I'm sure they were there too. Mayor Richard J. Daley? Absolutely. And the governor of Illinois, and the state senators and representatives, and Cardinals and Bishops and Monsignors by the bus load. If you were anybody, you'd want to be giving a speech to the Poles in Humboldt Park on May 3rd.
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These speeches were Cold War speeches, speeches full of anger and fury and blood. Poland had been taken over by the Russians at the end of the Second World War, and the Poles wanted it back; and they wanted some American politician to say he was with us in wanting it get it back. My father and his friends and thousands of other Poles stood before the statue of Kosciusko riding a riding a high stepping cavalry charger and listened to speeches about charging into Soviet-controlled Poland and fighting to make it free. These were speeches full of steel and rubble and blood. They were full of anti-Communist vitriol and calls for the US to bomb the stuffing out of Moscow, unleash those American tanks with their nuclear-tipped artillery shells.

You'd hear Polish soldiers who had fought the Nazis in Poland in 1939, in France in 1940, in England in 1941, in Italy in 1943, in France in 1944, and at the gates of Berlin in 1945 stand up and talk about how the USSR was a paper lion, that when the Reds came into Poland in 1945 they were riding shaggy ponies and the Russian soldiers had rags on their feet instead of shoes.

My dad would talk about this all the time. He would talk about how the Reds he saw in 45 (he was in the eastern half of Germany) were as emaciated as the Poles he suffered along side with in the slave labor camps. My dad never figured that the West's war against the USSR would be a walk over, but he always felt that the West owed it to Poles to help them regain Poland. It was only right because the Poles shed more blood in the fight against Hitler than the British and the French and the Americans combined. They had shed that blood and been betrayed by their Allies. The only reward the Poles received for fighting against Hitler was to have their country turned over to the Soviets.
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After listening to the speeches, groups of people would come back to our house for more speeches and drinking and reminiscing and singing. They loved to sing the song about the red poppies on Monte Cassino and the Polish National anthem. They loved to sing about how "Poland will never fall so long as we were alive."

And there was always some guy who would bring out his accordion, and he would start playing, and there would be more singing and more weeping. And it would never seem to stop.

(The photo of the Polish accordion player is by John Vachon, a UN photographer who followed and photographed the Poles who returned to Poland. His superb pictures are available in his book Poland, 1946.

MAY 3, POLISH CONSTITUTION DAY

2008-05-19T14:02:00.000-07:00

In the 50s, when I was a child growing up around Humboldt Park in Chicago, the biggest non-religious holiday was not Halloween or the 4 of July or Memorial Day. It was always May 3, Polish Constitution Day, Trzeciego Maja. My family would start preparing weeks ahead of time, cleaning the house, sprucing up what needed to be painted, sanded, or nailed, making sure we would have the food and drink we'd need for all of our guests.

We lived only about a half a block from the park where every year Poles celebrated the 3rd of May, and we knew that there would be dozens and dozens of our Polish friends stopping by to help us celebrate after the big parade in the park and all of the speeches by local and national politicians.

This holiday was important not just because it gave Polish friends a chance to celebrate the way they did in the Old Country, but because it re-affirmed a promise they had made to each other and to Poland. They had promised never to forget Poland, never to give up fighting for her freedom.

Poland had also made a promise to them, and the 3rd of May was the day when she re-affirmed her promise. She promised that despite all the chains that she was shackled by, all the foreign armies that occupied her and raped her and spat on her, she would remain the country of their dreams and hopes forever.

This was one of the things my dad taught me, the sacredness of the 3rd of May, and the sacredness of this promise.

Shortly after he died, I wrote a poem about the 3rd of May and what that date meant to him. It's called "Poland."

Poland

They’ll never see it again, these old Poles
with their dreams of Poland. My father
told me when I was a boy that those who tried
in ‘45 were turned back at the borders

by shoeless Russians dressed in rags and riding
shaggy ponies. The Poles fled through the woods,
the unlucky ones left behind, dead
or what’s worse wounded, the lucky ones

gone back to wait in the old barracks
in the concentration and labor camps
in Gatersleben or Wildflecken
for some miracle that would return them

to Poznan or Katowice. But God
wasn’t listening or His hands were busy
somewhere else. Later, in America
these Poles gathered with their brothers

and with their precious sons and daughters
every May 3, Polish Constitution Day,
to pray for the flag. There was no question
then what the colors stood for, red for all

that bleeding sorrow, white for innocence.
And always the old songs telling the world
Poland would never fall so long as poppies
flower red, and flesh can conquer rock or steel.

-- from Lightning and Ashes
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PS: If you want to read some of the history behind May 3rd, Polish Constitution Day, you can check out a brief article in Polonia Today.

GROWING UP POLISH AMERICAN: UPDATE

2008-04-24T09:58:00.000-07:00

I posted a piece recently on this blog about Growing Up Polish American. One of the things I talked about was a series of photos I had once seen of the ship I came to America on. It was the General H. Taylor, and it was bringing Displaced Persons from to the US Germany after the war. The photos were taken on the day we arrived in America, June 21, 1951.

Here's what I wrote:

Fifty years later, I found a series of pictures in the New York Times archive of the ship we sailed on, the General Taylor, taken the day we arrived. These photographs stopped me. History, the past, had given me a gift. We weren’t in any of the pictures, but we must have brushed against the people who were. We must have stood in line with them, waited for food with them, closed our eyes and prayed with them, worried about what it would be like in America with them.
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We were all Displaced Persons, country-less refugees, who had lost our parents and grandparents, our families and our homes, our churches and our names, everything. It had all been left behind, buried in the great European grave yard that stretched from the English Channel to the Urals and from the Baltic Sea to the Mediterranean. And here we all were on this former troop ship, coming to start a new life in America. We could not have imagined what we would find and what we would become.

My friend Joe Glaser tracked down the pictures. They appear in a book called The Tumultuous Fifties published by the New York Times. They were never published in the paper, but they were reprinted as a contact sheet in the book.

Here are some of those images:

The Tumultuous Fifties: A View from the New York Times Photo Archives by Douglas Dreishpoon, Alan Trachtenberg, and Luc Sante, 2001.

KATYN: The Forest of the Dead

2008-04-09T16:59:00.000-07:00

April is the month when many of the killings at Katyn Forest took place during World War II. Poles try to remember this every year, and I've been thinking about Katyn recently. I've been thinking about Katyn and my father.

He told me about how the Soviets took 15,000-20,000 Polish Army officers and killed them. Nobody knows the number for certain.

My father used to say, "It's hard to count bones."
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My father never wanted me to forget about Katyn.

Years ago, I wrote a poem about it for my book Lightning and Ashes, and I want to share the poem with you on this 68th anniversary of the Katyn Massacre.

KATYN

There are no Great Walls there,

No towers leaning or not leaning

Declaring some king's success

Or mocking another's failure,

No gleaming cathedral where you can

Pray for forgiveness or watch

The cycle of shadows play
Through the coolness of the day,

And soon not even the names

Of those who died will be remembered

(Names like Skrzypinski, Chmura,

Or Anthony Milczarek).

Their harsh voices and tearing courage

Are already lost in the wind,

But their true monuments

Will always be there, in the dust

And the gray ashes and the mounds

Settling over the bodies over which

No prayers were ever whispered,

No tears shed by a grieving mother

Or a trembling sister.

______________________________________

Here's a trailer for the Oscar-nominated film KATYN by Andrej Wajda.

Growing Up Polish American

2008-04-05T16:02:00.000-07:00

The following article appeared in a special issue of the journal Polish American Studies dedicated to Polish-American poets Phil Boiarski, Linda Nemec Foster, Leonard Kress, Mark Pawlak, Cecilia Woloch, and me. The issue featured a gathering of poems by each poet as well as a personal essay from each writer about what it means to be a Polish-American writer. The entire issue is available from the Polish American Historical Association.

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I wrote about what it was like growing up in the Polish Triangle in Chicago in the 50s and 60s, and how that shaped the kind of writer I am.

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Here's what I wrote:

Why I am a Polish-American Poet

I was born in a Displaced Persons’ camp (a DP camp) in Germany after World War II and came to the states with my parents Jan and Tekla Guzlowski and my sister Danusha as refugees in June of 1951.

Forty years later, I found a series of pictures in the New York Times archive of the ship we sailed on, the General Taylor, taken the day we arrived. These photographs stopped me. History, the past, had given me a gift. We weren’t in any of the pictures, but we must have brushed against the people who were. We must have stood in line with them, waited for food with them, closed our eyes and prayed with them, worried about what it would be like in America with them.

We were all Displaced Persons, country-less refugees, who had lost our parents and grandparents, our families and our homes, our churches and our names, everything. It had all been left behind, buried in the great European grave yard that stretched from the English Channel to the Urals and from the Baltic Sea to the Mediterranean. And here we all were on this former troop ship, coming to start a new life in America. We could not have imagined what we would find and what we would become.

After working in the farms around Buffalo, New York, to pay off the cost of our passage over, my parents, my sister, and I settled in Chicago, first near Wicker Park and later in the Humboldt Park area, an area with lots of other Poles and DPs, refugees, survivors, and immigrants. And one of the things we soon found out there was who we were. We weren’t Poles and we definitely weren’t Polish Americans. I never heard those words. What I did hear in the streets and in the schools and in the stores was that we were Polacks. We were the people who nobody wanted to rent a room to or hire or help. We were the “wretched refuse” of somebody else’s shore, dumped now on the shore of Lake Michigan, and most people we came across in America wished we’d go back to where we came from. And that we’d take the rest of the Polacks with us.

So, if anyone had ever asked me when I was growing up, “Say, kid, you want to be a Polish American poet or a Polish American teacher or doctor or wizard,” I would have told him to take a hike, but not in words so gentle.

Poles, I felt, were losers. They worked in factories when they could get jobs, they were rag-and-bone men leading horse-drawn wagons through the alleys of Chicago, they went door to door selling bits of string and light bulbs, they didn’t know how to drive cars or make phone calls or eat in restaurants. They stood on street corners with pieces of paper in their hands trying to get Americans to help them get to the address printed on the paper, mumbling “Prosceh, Pan” (please, sir) or “Prosceh, Pani” (please, lady).

When I was a child, I thought that Poles didn’t know how to do anything and Americans knew how to do everything. Americans knew how to be happy. They could go to ball games, zoos, museums, planetariums, and movies. They could stroll freely through the great American, sunshiny-bright world like so many smiling, charming Bing Crosbys, singing the song “Pennies from Heaven” as they strolled and believing every word of its chorus: “Every time it rains, it rains pennies from heaven.”

Americans could go to restaurants and order meals and not get into arguments with waiters about the price of a hamburger, or other customers in the restaurant about who was there first. They could go to picnics and not lose their children or their children's balloons. Americans could go to weddings and dance waltzes without ripping their pants, without falling down, without getting into fights, without beating their children.

Americans could laugh at the jokes Milton Berle told on TV, and know what they meant. Uncle Miltie could deadpan the punch line, “Sure, the lady was from Missouri,” and Americans would roll in the aisles till they busted a gut. They could smile and mean it, show love, concern, happiness, sorrow, sadness. And all at the right and appropriate times!

Poles, on the other hand, seemed to be hobbled.

I actually believed that there were places we couldn't go.

When I was a boy growing up in Chicago, I never knew any one who ever went to a professional ball game. This despite the fact that I lived about two miles from Wrigley Field and maybe three miles from Comiskey Park. It was as if there were written restrictions. Poles could not go to ball games. Or museums. Or zoos. Ever! I'm sure now much of this was simply the result of growing up in a working-class neighborhood with working-class parents where even one night at a ball game was an extreme extravaganza. Who could afford a trip to a ballpark? I realize this now, but at that time I had the feeling that Poles just didn't do such things. Only Americans did them.

And nothing ever seemed to go right. Washing machines would break down for no reason. Repairmen were always crooks or incompetents. Shirts -- even brand new ones -- would be stained or missing a button. My father once spent what seemed like a year working on a drain pipe that wouldn’t be mended, no matter how hard he struggled with his mismatched wrenches.

I remember one time when my mother went into a Woolworth's dime store and tried to bargain down the price of a Lincoln Log set. Of course, that strategy didn't work either. Nothing worked. Our Polack fate was hard karma. And there was no one to tell you how to change the hard karma, make it a little more malleable, a little softer. Everyone was in the same boat and trying to find some way to survive, keep afloat. The Oleniechaks, the Popowchaks, the Budzas, the Czarneks, the Goras, the Pitlaks, the Bronowickis, the Stupkas, the Milczareks, the Wos’s, the Kapustkas, and the Guzlowskis—all of us on that block of houses on Evergreen Street were drowning in the kind of hard karma that only the DPs, the dumb Polacks, knew.

So if somebody had asked me back then, “Do you see yourself becoming a Polish American Poet?” I would have said, “Are you kidding?”

I started running away from Polish American stuff as soon as I could, and for most of my life I’ve been running. Not all the Polish kids I knew were like that, of course. I had a friend who held tight to his Polishness, and to hear us talk about our youth, you’d think we grew up in separate countries with concertina wire between them. He went to Polish School on Saturdays and was a member of the Polish Scouts. I would sooner have worked a 20-hour day at the kind of hard labor my dad and mom knew in the slave labor camps. I didn’t want anything to do with that Polack stuff—I wanted to be an unmistakable and anonymous American.

Even though I didn’t speak English until I was five or six, I can barely speak a lick of Polish now. I consciously fought to strip all of that away, and I succeeded to a degree. When I tried speaking it to my aged mother a couple of years ago, she’d always say the same thing. “Johnny, please stop. You’re hurting my ears.”

So why am I editing special issues of Polish American Studies on Polish American poetry, and writing poems about being a Polish American?

The answer isn’t easy.

I think a lot of it comes from who my parents were. If my parents had been Illinois farm people raising soy beans and corn or if they had been Italian gelato sellers, I don’t think I would be writing about them. I would be like ever other poet in America: writing about the weather or what it’s like being driving a big car west or east on I-80. But instead my parents were people who had been struck dumb and quivering by history, by the Second World War, by their lives in the labor and DP camps.

My mom used to like to say, “Slach traffi.”

I don’t know if this is a Polish idiom or if she made it up or what. Literally, I think it means “the truncheon or billy club will find you.” Maybe it’s something the Nazis used to say in the camps when they were beating the Poles and Jews and Gypsies and Russians to get them to move faster pushing the cement-filled wheelbarrows. But whatever it means literally, here is what it means to me: shit happens, and not only does shit happen, it will find you no matter what you do, or where you run, and it will not just get in your way, it will cover you and smother you and kill you.

I grew up with people who had seen their families killed, babies bayoneted, friends castrated and then shot to death. My mom saw her sister’s legs ripped apart by broken glass as she struggled through a narrow window to escape from the Nazis.

And no one much cared.

Even if people don't want to read what I write, I feel that I have to write my poems about my parents just to make sure someone does. Really, there just aren't a lot of people writing about people like my parents and the other DPs. And if I don't write, who will? Imagine all of those hundreds of thousands of Poles who came to this country as DPs. Who wrote for them? They couldn't write for themselves. I sometimes feel that I am writing for all those people whose stories were never told, whose voices got lost somewhere in the great cemetery of the 20th century, and I have an obligation to listen to those voices and give them a place to be heard.

My poems give my parents and their experiences and the experiences of people like them a voice. My parents had very little education. My father never went to school and could barely write his name. My mother had two years of formal education. I feel that I have to tell the stories they would write themselves if they could. For the last thirty years I have been writing poems about their lives, and I sometimes think that I am not only writing about their lives, but also about the lives of all those forgotten, voiceless refugees, DP's, and survivors that the last century produced.

All of history’s Polacks.

(The photos: My parents, my sister Donna, her daughters [Cheryl, Kathie and Denise], and I in front of the Old Warsaw Restaurant, 1979. The photo was taken by Linda Calendrillo. My mother and I in a cage at the Back of the Yards festival circa 1959. A photo by Art Shay of my neighbor Nelson Algren coming out of the Division Street Y.)

Diversity

2008-03-17T18:47:00.001-07:00

I did a series of presentations about my parents a couple of weeks ago at Lowndes High School.

After one of them, Joey Slater, a student there, told me about a project he was doing photographing people making signs and displaying them. The project was called "Diversity," and he wanted me to make a sign he could film and add to his project.

I said I would be happy to.

A Letter from Uncle Buddy

2008-01-24T18:01:00.000-08:00

I got a letter from Linda's Uncle Buddy.
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For Christmas, Linda's dad Tony gave his brother Buddy a copy of Third Winter of War: Buchenwald, my book about my dad, and Uncle Buddy wanted to tell me about it.

The letter means a lot to me, and you'll see why when you read it.

Here's his letter:

Dear John,

I read the poems you wrote. I found them very moving. I'm no whiz kid about understanding every line you wrote but I could feel the sadness, the hurt, and the agony in your poems. I hope when people read these poems they will realize how these people in the camps suffered and how they were tortured.

I guess I feel it more because I saw it. It took me 50 years to talk about it. I still think about it, and my nightmares that come and go.

The camp we took back in April 4, 1945 was a sub-station to Buchenwald. It was called Ohrdruf.

Be well, our love to you and Linda and Lillian

Uncle Buddy

PS. Don't ever stop writing.

______________________________________________________________

That was the letter, and as I said, it means a lot to me.

I knew Buddy had helped liberate the concentration camp at Ohrdruf. A couple years ago a video came out called Nightmare's End: The Liberation of the Camps. It's a powerful documentary about the soldiers who freed the camps.

When I was still teaching, I would sometimes show this film in my American Lit class when we were talking about the literature of the World War II period. The response would pretty much be the same every time I showed it. I would roll the video tape and turn off the lights. The film would come on. First, there would be silence. Then there would be weeping. At the end of the film, I wouldn't turn the lights back on right away because I knew that students wanted some time alone with their thoughts and emotions.

I saw this documentary maybe a dozen time, and it always moved me. And what always moved me most was watching Uncle Buddy and listening to him.

In the documentary, he's being interviewed by a person who's off camera. All we see is Uncle Buddy, and he just starts talking about going into the camp, and what you realize immediately is that his memories of that day he came to Ohrdruf, April 4, 1945, are as new and intense as they were then. He was in his late teens when he came upon the camp, and in the video he's in his late 70s. Fifty years have gone by and the memories are still new, still intense. What he saw will never leave him. It will always be there.

He can barely talk about what he remembers seeing, but he forces himself to go on and what he says about the prisoners in that concentration camp is simple and human and profound: "They were just people."

Thanks, Uncle Buddy.

What We Learned

2008-01-11T12:37:00.000-08:00

A couple of months ago, I met Gladys Kirkland, a teacher at Valdosta High School, at a poetry reading for the Women's Studies Program at Valdosta State University. She came up to me after my reading and asked if I would do a presentation about my parents and their experiences in the Nazi concentration camps to her class. I said yes right away. I'm always interested in telling people about my parents and what happened to them and a lot of other people during World War II.
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The presentation spiralled into a series of presentations as other teachers at VHS, Marieh Fitzgerald, Larry Striggles, and Edward Wilcox, asked Ms. Kirkland to ask me to speak to their classes.
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I was game for all of them. I like talking about my parents.

It was a great day.

For each of the groups of students, I talked about World War II, about the reasons why the Nazis felt they needed to conquer other people, about my parents and what happened to them during and after the war. I also read some of my poems from Lightning and Ashes and The Language of Mules, and Third Winter of War: Buchenwald, and I took questions. Lots and lots of questions.
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About a month later, Ms. Kirkland wrote me an email and said she had something for me from the students. I figured it was candy or a card they signed. The gift was that, but it was also so much more.

The students put together a book entitled This is What We Learned from Mr. Guzlowski. It was a gathering of essays they had written and pictures they had drawn following my talks.

Since receiving the book, I've read through it all a number of times, and each time I've found more to think about.
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I want to share some of the book with you. The following is the cover of the book. After that, I've posted some of the things the students wrote. At the end there is a picture from the book. I want to thank all of these students and their teachers.

I wish my parents were alive to see this tribute to them and the others who were taken to the concentration and slave labor camps.

When the Americans and Russians came they destroyed the Nazis and set people free. The sad thing about that is they had no where to go. Countries wouldn’t accept them, so they had to go back to the camps so they would have shelter, food, and help.

I learned that the camps were the worst place to be. It was like there was no God.

Mr. Guzlowski’s mother kept crying and crying.

It was sad when he said that his mother’s mother and sister were killed. I wonder what had happened back then that was the reason for it.

The German’s killed all of the Jews they could find. They took people from Poland too, and they killed about 2,000,000 of them. They were sent to concentration camps.

The Germans went through the villages and killed the weak, and they took the strong to work in the camps.

I was surprised when Mr. Guzlowski said his father ate flies and other nasty stuff in the camps. He must have been a small, skinny man to eat stuff like that. I can’t imagine eating flies and chewing on pebbles.

What the Nazis did was not right.

I’ve learned that no matter what you do or how much you make your life can be taken away just so easily.

There was no where the prisoners could run because they would’ve got shot or chased down by the dogs.

It was a period of time where if you didn’t work, you died. If you complained, you died. If you cried, you died, and if you didn’t really die, you died inside.

His mother came home one day and found her mother, his sister, and her sister’s baby dead because the Germans had shot them.

His mother didn’t like to talk about it.

The death camps were for killing off Jews, Polish people, gypsies, and so many many others. It was done because the Germans wanted to kill off races and ethnic groups they thought were inferior.

The most important part of the presentation was just being there to learn what happened…. It all becomes real to us.

I say that genocide like that should not take place ever again.

The Nazis killed men, women, and even babies which I thought was very evil. They had no mercy.

It made me think a lot. I wonder if some one would do us like that one day.

I also feel the pain and suffering when my grandma tells me stories of what life was like when we were slaves. I feel sorry for grandma when she cries then.

It angers me that one man and his army could do such a thing to all of those people and not have any guilt or sadness or grief for what they did to them. They killed for the joy of it, and that sickens me. What kind of monster would do such a thing? I feel sad for the people that survived because even after it was all over they still had trouble to deal with, even after all they had been through. They have to carry around the memories of all the death, hurt, and pain that they have seen. They will forever carry around the wounds on the outside and inside. Everyday they will have to live with the fact that their loved ones will never return to them. They will always have the memory of how bad they had lived in the camps, and how hard they had to work to even survive.

If it was me I couldn’t imagine myself doing what they did to survive.

He also said that he and his mother went into a furniture store one day, and he asked her if she liked the striped furniture set, and she said she didn’t because it brought back those dark memories of the camps and the striped uniform she had to wear.

I wondered what the ladies did when it was time for their period to come on, and I wonder how they would clean themselves. Thinking about that makes me sick.

When Mr. Guzlowski’s father was finally free, he had no teeth, and was missing one eye, and he weighed 75 pounds. Mr. Guzlowski’s mother lost her momma, sister, and sister’s baby. She cried and cried till she was a puddle of tears and she was still crying.

He told us how that stuff hurt his parents and how his dad used to wake up screaming and how his mom always hated anything with stripes.

A person cannot control how they are born and what their race, gender, or background are. And that is the torment of humanity.
.
They should just let those evil men be thrown into the depths of hell for all eternity.

So many people died.

I learned that if they give you bread, you eat it. If they beat you, you run.

It was so bad that his mom didn’t want to have anything in her house with stripes because she had to wear stripes the whole time they stayed in the camps.

It was a dreadful period for the world.

It was very disturbing because he said his dad was beaten for complaining about the food.

When he would ask his mom about the things that happened, she couldn’t even talk to him about it.

He told us they would kill women, men, children, even babies.

He told us about his dad and how he was taken to the camp when he was 20 years old. He told us that his dad was hit in the face a bunch of times with a club so bad that all his teeth were knocked out and he went blind in one eye.

Some people even slept with their bread closed up real tight in their hands.

Many of his father’s friends were beaten to death.

It was crazy. It’s like they wanted the people to die—like they didn’t care for anyone at the camp.

What I learned was this stuff is real.

There were thousands of people dying and the rest of the world knew it but wasn’t doing anything about it.

I learned that the Nazis were mean.

Many people didn’t survive. They died in the boxcars from lack of food and crowding. They died in the camps from beatings and starvation and work.

Mr. Guzlowski explained that the Germans thought they were gods.

I would have gone insane if I had to go to a concentration camp.

The Nazis considered themselves god-like, being above the law and being able to treat “lesser beings” badly without impunity. Many people were starved, killed, or beaten for no reason except existing.

The most important thing that I learned was to be happy with what I have and to be thankful for what I got and that life and death are nothing to play around with.

The Nazis were cold hearted people.

His parents were not Jewish so they were used for slave labor.

What I learned from his presentation in general was to appreciate your family and the freedom we do have because tomorrow isn’t promised today.

There are cruel people in this world.

His dad was fed rotten meat with maggots on it, and he still ate it because he needed the strength. Americans go through drive-thru windows and order their meal and if they put one thing on there they didn’t want, they send it back.

I never knew so many bad events had really happened.

It was like slavery. After hearing all that, it made me realize you can be treated bad no matter what color you are.

He told us that they would shoot the weak and leave them.

They were forced to carry a box of bricks around the yard of the camp just so they would be busy.

The most important thing I learned about Mr. Guzlowski’s parents experiences was that his parents kept going on.

The Nazis loved to see how people would look if they didn’t eat for a long time.

Women died from crying.

Now we live in peace without terror in the streets, all people get along and we all sing songs about how lovely this world is with all different races and beautiful kids and how we live in peace with our deadly fears.

What My Father Believed

2007-12-26T10:11:00.000-08:00

Garrison Keillor's reading of my poem "What My Father Believed" from my book Lightning and Ashes is now available at the following link:

http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/programs/2007/12/24/#friday

The poem talks about my father's faith, how he learned about God in Poland as a child, and how his faith sustained him in the concentration camps in Nazi Germany.

Christmas and Forgiveness

2007-12-20T13:22:00.000-08:00

I recently gave a talk about my parents and their experiences with the Nazis to Narci Drossos’s class at Valdosta High School in Georgia. I talked about my father who spent 4 years in Buchenwald and other camps around Buchenwald, and I talked about my mother who spent 2 and half years in various slave labor camps in Germany.

During the discussion after my talk, a young man asked me a question. I’m sure it was in part sparked by the Christmas season, the talk that you hear at this time of year about “Peace on Earth and Good Will to all Men.” He asked me whether or not I forgave the Germans for what they did to my parents.

The question stopped me. I haven’t thought about it before.

Of course, I had thought about whether or not my parents forgave the Germans. My father never met a guard he would forgive. They were brutal men who beat him and killed his friends for no reason. One sub-zero winter night, these guards ran roll calls over and over. Hundreds of prisoners in pajama thin clothes stood outside in the cold and snow. By morning, about a hundred prisoners were dead.

He felt anger toward all the Germans.

My mother seldom talked about her experiences during the war. If you asked her what they were like, most of the time she would just say, "If they give you bread, you eat it. If they beat you, you run away."

A lot of people say, forget it; it was all a long time ago. For my parents, it was never a long time ago.

My parents carried the pain and nightmares with them every day.

When my father was dying in a hospice, there were times when he was sure that the doctors and the nurses were the guards who beat him when he was a prisoner in the concentration camp. There were also times when he couldn’t recognize me. He looked at me and was frightened, as if I were one of the guards.

I don’t think he ever forgave the guards for what they did to him.

I remember asking my mom once toward the end of her life if she forgave the Germans. She thought for a while. I’m sure she was thinking about her mother and her sister and her sister’s baby. They were killed by Germans who came to her farm house in eastern Poland. My mother saw this and escaped, at least for a while, by jumping through a broken window and making her way to a forest.

What my mother finally said surprised me. I thought she was going to say what I had heard my father say over and over that all the Germans were evil. But that’s not what she said. She told me a story about when she first was brought to Germany. She was taken to a camp where they worked the women just like they were men, making the women work sixteen, eighteen, twenty hour shifts, six days a week. She said that she knew she couldn’t survive that for long, maybe a week, maybe two.

She was saved by a German, a guard in a concentration camp.

For some reason, this German guard took pity on her. Who knows what his motives were? My mother often said that Germans thought she looked like a German, a niemka in Polish. Maybe this was what got her saved. Maybe not. Whatever it was that motivated this guard, he succeeded in getting her transferred to a different work area where the work was not killing work. She survived the war.

After telling me this story, she said, “Some Germans were good. Some bad. I forgive the good ones.”

All of this went through my head when the student asked me if I forgave the Germans, and here’s what I said to him, “I don’t forgive the stupid ones, the ones who think that what happened to my parents didn’t happen or it wasn’t as bad as people say.”

And I told this student why I was saying this. I told him how I had gone to an academic conference in Paderborn, Germany, in 1989, and I met a woman, a professor, there. We were chatting, and she asked me if I had ever been in Germany before. I said, “Yes, I have. I was born in Germany in fact, in Vinnenberg.”

She was surprised and asked me about this. I told her my parents had been kidnapped by the Germans and brought to work in the slave labor and concentration camps in Germany, and that I was born in a refugee camp after the war.

She said, “Your parents were lucky they were brought to Germany during the war. It was better for them here than in Poland. Here they got good food, shelter. Here they got to escape the chaos of the war.”

I looked at her and couldn’t believe that she could say such a thing. I thought about my father and mother and what they lost and suffered during the war, and I thought about how their lives after the war never shook the scars of the war. I thought about my father’s nightmares and his dead eye, the one blinded by a guard; and I thought about my mother’s coldness, her inability to feel much beyond grief and anger and hatred. I thought about how she directed that coldness and anger and hatred toward my father, my sister, and me.

I didn’t know what to say to this German professor, and didn’t say anything.

She was not the kind of person I could forgive. She was one of the stupid ones.

This is what I told the student who asked if I forgave the Germans. Some I forgave, the smart ones who recognized what had happened during the war. Some I didn't forgive, the ones who didn't recognize what had happened.

But later as I kept thinking about what the student had asked and what I had answered, I started thinking more and more about my mother. With all she had experienced in the war and with all of her coldness, anger, and hate, she was still able to find some human warmth in her heart. She was still able to forgive some Germans.

This makes me think that I should be able to do more than condemn the stupid ones and forgive the smart ones, that I should be able to feel more of the good will toward all of them than I do.

(The photo of the Buchenwald prisoners above was taken by Margaret Bourke-White, one of the first photographers to come to this concentration camp after the liberation.)

Happy Thanksgiving Day

2007-11-21T08:28:00.000-08:00

Happy Places

2007-11-14T17:31:00.000-08:00

Sometimes when I'm doing poetry readings, I get questions about whether or not my sister and my parents and I were ever happy given the kind of experiences my parents had in Germany during the war. I can't talk for them, but I know that there were times that I was happy when I was growing up. This is a piece I wrote a couple years ago about those times.

We all have special perfect places, places where we feel most ourselves, most comfortable. In these special places, we feel our “self” most fully; we feel that what we were meant "to be" is suddenly "is"; we feel that our pasts, our presents, and our futures are mingling. We feel the joyful arms of our guardian angels and personal saints embracing us, and we feel their warmth touching us in seventeen places all at once. For some people, this special place is a chair in the kitchen or a bleacher at a baseball game.

Happy people are those who know where this place is.

They can go there when they need to: maybe not in their darkest moments (at the bedside of a dying parent or friend, or when a woman or man they truly loved leaves them finally with no offer of a hand to hold for even a moment), but surely in those moments after those moments they can turn to these holy places.

For me this place was a place in time: The June day I turned four, a Sunday in 1952, when I stood in the garden in the back of a house we were renting from a veteran of the First World War, an alcoholic with a plate in his head to cover the spot where a shell fragment had carried away a piece of his skull (his name was Ponchek which means donut in Polish and always made me laugh to say it), and I stood in his garden among Black Eyed Susans with their yellow petals and long necks. And my mother in a white dress with little blue flowers sat in the garden between me and my sister, and my father stood in front of us with a Brownie Cadet box camera.

He was asking us in Polish to smile, while my mother told me about the day ahead, how we would go to Kiddie Land up in Melrose Park, Illinois, and my sister Danusha and I would ride on the blue and yellow and red cars and the roller coaster built just for kids. My mother made it sound like there was something special about being a kid the way she talked about the day we had planned.

It makes a picture I don’t want to forget.

Maybe we remember these special places and special times and turn to them because they were the places and times our parents were happy, before their lives took their inevitable turns. Maybe not. Like most of us, I’m not good at figuring out the complex why of things.

But I remember a Sunday morning, and you remember sitting at a ball game between your mother and father, and both are screaming at the batter in a way that frightens you just a little but you know is okay; or you remember a day on a beach in Ocean City with your mother laughing at your father wearing her bathing cap pulled down over his eyes; or you remember your father sitting at the piano with a cigarette between his lips playing a piece you love like “Wild Colonial Boy” or “Stardust” while your mother stands at the ironing board straightening a pleat in her skirt with steam.

November 11, 1918--The Day World War I Ended

2007-11-06T18:51:00.000-08:00

I first heard of World War I when we came to America as Displaced Persons in 1951. We were refugees after World War II, and we moved into a basement apartment on Hamilton Street in Chicago.

Our landlord was a veteran of the First World War. He was a Polish American named Ponchek. He was also a drunk, but that wasn't anything special. There were a lot of drunks around. What made Ponchek special was that he had a steel plate in his head. As a kid and a recent immigrant to America, he had been drafted and sent to France to stop the Germans who were trying to rip France apart and shove it into the Atlantic. He ended up in the trenches in France in late October fighting the Germans, and a bullet took off the top of his head. The doctors cut away what bone they could, cleaned out the wound, and screwed a steel plate into the skull bone.

This fascinated me when I was a kid. I wondered about that plate, and what it felt like. Did Ponchek always feel a weight pressing down on his head? Was it like wearing a steel hat? A steel helmet? And I wondered what they covered the plate with. Skin? And where did it come from? Was it his skin or someone else's? I never could ask.

Like a lot of the veterans I knew, he was frightening. He wasn't a guy you wanted to spend a lot of time talking to.

Veterans were men who limped. They dragged their legs behind them like Lon Chaney in the Mummy movie. They were men who had wooden legs that creaked when they walked past you and the other kids sitting on the stoop. These veterans had no arms or only one arm, or were missing fingers or hands, or ears.

My dad, a guy who lost his left eye when he was clubbed by a Nazi guard in a concentration camp, used to go to a bar where the owner had a black, shiny rubber hand. He lost his real hand during the Warsaw Uprising in 1944 when he shoved a homemade grenade into the steel treads of a German tank. The black rubber hand was like some kind of weird toy. Sometimes, it looked like a black fist, sometimes it looked like an eight ball.

Sometimes, a vet without arms or legs sat on the sidewalk in front of this bar. He had a cloth hat in front of him, and he was selling pencils. He'd sit there smiling, making chit chat with the guys walking in and out of the bar. You'd toss him a nickel, and you could take a pencil, but most guys didn't. Who needs a pencil?

Veterans were frightening. Some of them beat their kids and got drunk and had trouble getting through the day. They had trouble getting through the night too. There were these two little girls who lived two doors away, Patty and Cathy. Their dad was a Korean War veteran, and he would come home from his job at about midnight. The kids and their mom had to be out of their basement apartment then. He would beat and curse all of them if they weren't. They'd have to walk around the neighborhood until he was safely in bed, asleep. This veteran didn't like to fall asleep with people in the house. Everyone knew he was crazy.

Ponchek was a veteran too, and -- like I said -- he was a drunk and a man with a steel plate in his head. One time he and his two buddies got so drunk that they all came down to our basement apartment and tried to force my mother into giving them money for whiskey. There she was alone in a house with her two little kids, and this drunk and his two drunk buddies came around trying to take money from her. They told her that she hadn't paid the rent, and that if she didn't paid them, they would throw her out on the street. What kind of guys would do that? She pushed Poncheck down and kicked him, and took a broom and beat him and his friends as they tried to get away from her. My mom was a veteran too; she spent two and a half years in a Nazi slave labor camp.

Three or four years later, my mom and dad and my sister and me visited Ponchek in the big Veterans Administration hospital on the south side of Chicago. We didn't have a car, and so we had to take buses, and it seemed like it took forever to get to the hospital. This must have been about 1956 or 1957. The hospital was full of veterans, men from World War I and World War II and the Korean War. Ponchek was dying from some kind of stomach cancer, and he was in a lot of pain. We came to say goodbye to him. We found him in a bed in the corridor because there were no available rooms.

He was happy to see us. My parents had brought him some cigarettes, and my dad gave him one, and lit it for him. My sister and I stood there watching my mom and dad and Ponchek smoke and talk. They talked about those days on Hamilton, and the good times they had.

They didn't mention his steel plate and his drinking and his craziness.

PS: Before I sign off, let me say something about Veterans Day.

It grows out of Armistice Day, the day the carnage of World War I ended. It ended on the 11th hour of the 11 th day of the 11th month.

Here's a poem by John McCrae called "In Flanders Field." He was a doctor who wrote the poem in 1915 for a friend who died in the Battle for Flanders Field. The battle lasted 100 days and cost 400,000 Allied and German casualties. The war went on for another 3 years after that, and millions of people died in those years.

Here's McCrae's poem:

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved, and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

When I told my daughter Lillian that I was going to use the Flanders Field poem, she suggested another poem.

Here's what Lillian wrote:

"Personally, I like the Ode of Remembrance (the 3rd and 4th stanzas of Binyon's "For the Fallen") that they use throughout the "British Empire" at Remembrance Day commemorations. I think Binyon's poem, at least the following two stanzas, is more universal. It could be any war, any century, any side; and I think that is what Remembrance Day is for, remembering every fallen soldier--every kid who is too naive or too idealistic or too stupid or too gullible and so they join up for all of the right and all of the wrong reasons and then they die, painfully and horribly and wastefully, but bravely and nobly."

And here's Binyon's poem:

They went with songs to the battle, they were young,
Straight of limb, true of eye, steady and aglow.
They were staunch to the end against odds uncounted,
They fell with their faces to the foe.

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old;
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.

PPS: Let me say just one more thing:

War comes to us, and we weep at our losses and pray for our delivery. And then peace comes and then peace goes, and wars come and come and come.

WOMEN IN WAR

2007-10-26T13:42:00.000-07:00

"Tell them we weren't the only ones."

My mother said that to me once just before I did a lecture about her experiences and my dad’s experiences as slave laborers in Nazi Germany. She wanted me to be sure I told the audience that my parents weren’t the only people that terrible things happened to in those concentration camps. I promised my mother I would, and in fact, when I got to the lecture hall that night and stood up in front of that audience the first thing I did was tell them what my mother told me to.

“We weren’t the only ones.”

For a long time, I thought I knew what she meant by that sentence. My mom hadn’t told me much about her experiences. My dad, however, had told me a lot about his terrible experiences during his five years in the Germany concentration camp system, and he also told me something about what had happened to my mother and her family, her mother, her sister, and her sister’s baby. They had been brutally murdered by the Nazis who came to their farm in eastern Poland. As I said, my mother didn’t talk about this experience or many of her other experiences for much of my life with her. I talk about this in one of my poems, “Here’s What My Mother Won’t Talk About.” In it, my mother’s response to my questions about her time under the Nazis is to tell me that I’m a fool and “If they give you bread, eat it. If they beat you, run.” That was pretty much it.

This last September, Tracy Meyers, the Director of the Women and Gender Studies Program at Valdosta State University, invited me to do a lecture and poetry reading about my mother’s experiences during and after the war.

To prepare for it, I started thinking about my mother’s experiences and her silence about so much that had happened to her. I re-read an article I read years before by Jessica Alpert called "Muted Testimony: Rape and Gendered Violence of the Holocaust." Alpert’s argument was that women tended not to talk about their experiences in the concentration camps and the death camps because of the sexual brutality they experienced. This led me to do some more research, and what I found out was that a lot of the histories and memoirs and literary writings about war talk about what men are doing in a war, but these histories don’t always look at what’s happening to women and how they are experiencing war.

It’s not surprising. Women’s experiences of war tend to be different than men’s experiences of war. Women’s experience tend to be brutal and without much glory or sense of victory or accomplishment. Doing a Google search of “women” and “war” brings up things like the Japanese rape of the city of Nanking. The actual number of rapes that occurred there is hard to pin down but they range from 20,000 to 80,000. One source said that when the Japanese soldiers weren’t raping the women, “They took great pleasure in forcing fathers to rape their daughters and sons to rape their mothers.” British historian Antony Beevor says in Berlin: The Downfall 1945 that the Russians raped millions of women as they moved west, pushing back the Germans in the final months of World War II. These women were not only German women but also Russian women and Polish women and Ukrainian women and the women in the liberated concentration and death camps.

In her study Victims, Heroes, Survivors: Sexual Violence on the Eastern Front in World War II (available on the internet), historian Wendy Jo Gertjejanssen argues that sexual violence against women by Russians and Germans both was common and seldom talked about.

Dr. Gertjejanssen says at the start of her study that sexual violence during the war happened to many, many women, perhaps millions, on the eastern front. These women were sexually abused and harassed, they were forced into military brothels, and they were raped and mutilated. Also, because they were deliberately starved, these women often found that they had to exchange sex for food and water to stay alive.

If you look at the memoirs left by women who had been in the camps, not many of these memoirs talk about the sexual brutality that took place in the camps. One of them that does is Seed of Sarah by Judith Isaacson. In fact, she talks about women’s silence about being sexually brutalized. In her book, Isaacson relates a conversation she had with her daughter about what happened to the women her mother knew during the war. Isaacson tells her that most of them had been raped and killed either by Nazis or the Russians. When her daughter wonders why no one ever hears about all of the women who were raped during the war, Isaacson answers, "The Anne Franks who survived rape don’t write their stories.”

Was my mother raped? Was she sexually brutalized?

These are hard questions for me to think about. They make me feel very sad. You want to think about the good things that happened to the ones you love; you don’t want to think of all the terrible things that might have happened. If my mother herself was not the victim of sexual brutalization, she must have seen it, and it must have hurt her deeply. One of the things my father frequently talked about and that I heard about from the time I was a kid was the story about the German soldier cutting a woman’s breasts with his bayonet. This woman was my aunt Genja who died with her baby and my grandmother when the Germans came to my mother’s farm.

Toward the end of her life, my mother told me about how she cried and couldn’t stop crying after this killing. I wrote a poem about it called “Grief.” It talks about how she was taken to Germany after the death of her sister Genja and the baby and her mother. Here it is:

Grief

My mother cried for a week, first in the boxcars
then in the camps. Her friends said, “Tekla,
don’t cry, the Germans will shoot you
and leave you in the field,” but she couldn’t stop.

Even when she had no more tears, she cried,
cried the way a dog will gulp for air
when it’s choking on a stick or some bone
it’s dug up in a garden and swallowed.

The woman in charge gave her a cold look
and knocked her down with her fist like a man,
and then told her if she didn’t stop crying
she would call the guard to stop her crying.

But my mother couldn’t stop. The howling
was something loose in her nothing could stop.

----------------------------------------------

I want to say one more things. The poet Christina Pacosz sent me an email a couple weeks ago reminding me that bad things haven’t stopped happening with the end of World War II. She’s absolutely right.

This comes from a UNICEF post on Sexual Violence as a Weapon of War:

"The State of the World's Children 1996 report notes that the disintegration of families in times of war leaves women and girls especially vulnerable to violence. Nearly 80 per cent of the 53 million people uprooted by wars today are women and children. When fathers, husbands, brothers and sons are drawn away to fight, they leave women, the very young and the elderly to fend for themselves. In Bosnia and Herzegovina, Myanmar and Somalia, refugee families frequently cite rape or the fear of rape as a key factor in their decisions to seek refuge."(http://www.unicef.org/sowc96pk/sexviol.htm)

My mother wasn’t the only one.

(Drawing by Kathe Kollwitz)

HISTORY AND NUMBERS

2007-10-10T11:27:00.000-07:00

I was invited by Gladys Kirkland to give a series of poetry readings/lectures about my parents and their experiences in World War II to the Freshmen Social Studies students at Valdosta High School last Thursday (Oct.4), and I wrote up an introduction that I hoped would get the students interested in what I was telling them about.

I know that a lot of the students I had over the years at Eastern Illinois University hated to hear about wars and such because it sounded to them like war was just a bunch of numbers. I was afraid that the students at VHS would respond like that, so I wrote up this introduction. I wanted them to know that the war was more than just numbers. I ended up not using the introduction because the students at VHS didn't seem afraid of numbers, but I hate to write something and not use it so I thought I would post my introduction here.

HISTORY AND NUMBERS

History is full of numbers, dates, fractions, the number of this, the number of that.

Maybe you’ve heard of the M-1 rifle or the V-2 bomb or the B-17 bomber, or 2nd Lieutenants and Privates first class and 5-star generals.

We even give numbers to Wars. There was the 100 Year War, the War of 1812, the First World War, and World War II. Right now the US is fighting what’s some times called the Second Gulf War.

But it's the Second World War that I'm here to talk about.

If you go on line, and Google WWII statistics, you’ll get a lot of numbers, enough to fill up a couple or more textbooks.

You’ll find out that the Nazis murdered 6,000,000 Jews. You’ll find out that altogether 52,000,000 people died in the war, more or less. You’ll hear that 20 million died in Russia, 7,000,000 died in Germany. 2 million in Japan. I was surprised to hear that Yugoslavia, a country that I don’t think much about anymore and probably never did, lost 1.7 million people. The country my parents came from was Poland, and it lost 1/6 of its population. Before the war, there were 36 million Poles; that means about 6 million died. In Warsaw, the capitol city of Poland, a quarter of a million civilians died during a 60 day battle to throw the Germans out in 1944.

America got off pretty easy in WWII. It lost just a half a million, mostly soldiers. In those other countries it was about half soldiers and half civilians. “Civilians” is another way of saying wives and husbands and their children.

There are also the numbers involved in how much was spent on the war. The numbers here run pretty high. The U.S. spent the most money on the war, an estimated $341 billion. Germany was next, with $272 billion, followed by the Soviet Union with $192 billion. All the billions spent probably add up to a trillion.
There are also numbers associated with what kind of mess was made by the war. The Soviet government calculated that Russia lost 30 percent of its national wealth. As far as I can figure, that means it lost one out of every three of everything: houses, banks, cars, schools, railroads, bikes, and farms.

In Germany, bombing and shelling produced 4 billion cu m (5 billion cu yd) of rubble. I don’t know how big a pile that is but it sounds like a big pile of rubble. By the end of the war, the Germany capitol Berlin had been pretty much leveled. The people that count up such things estimate that 400,000 buildings were destroyed in Berlin. After the war, the Germans who survived the war got shovels and bulldozers and shoved all of those 400,000 building out of the city. Altogether there was about 17,000,000 cubic yards of rubble, bricks, bits of glass and silverware that melted together during the bombings, wood beams, busted up furniture, rusting pipes and porcelain bathtubs. It made a mountain 390 foot tall that in the past was used by Berliners looking to ski in the winter. It’s called Teufelsberg in German. That means Devil’s Mountain.

War does generate a lot of numbers, and the numbers tend to be big.

I was talking to a friend at VSU, a mathematician, a person who studies numbers, and she said that most people can’t imagine a number larger than 1000.

I know I can’t.

I only think about small numbers, human numbers. My mother, for example, would be one, my dad would be another one. That’s two, the two my poems are about.

(The photos are from the book The Fire: The Bombing of Germany, 1939-1945 by the historian Jörg Friedrich--there's a link to it on the right hand side.)