Art in the Holocaust

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

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The above painting is by Miriam Brysk.

The Poems of the Poles Who Were Taken to Siberia

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.

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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

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.

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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

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.



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

The Stories of Four Poles

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.

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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

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

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

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If you want to read more of Oriana's poems, she has a new book out called April Snow, the winner of the New Women's Voice Poetry Award.  Some of her poems 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.


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