My father grew up in poverty, an orphan working on a farm in Poland. When he was 20, he was taken to a concentration camp in Germany. He didn't have much education at all, could barely read and write. But he had faith. This is a poem about what he believed. What My Father Believed
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. Another is called The Wooden Trunk We Carried With Us From Germany. There's also The Day My Mother Died. Just click on the above titles, and it will take you right to them.
My mother died seven years ago this January 18. She died in a hospice in Sun City, Arizona.
When she died, we had her funeral service near Darien, Illinois, where my sister Donna lives. She made the arrangements for the services and the burial later up in Niles, Illinois, at St. Adalbert's Cemetery.
The priest who was going to perform the service was Father Bob, and he didn't know my mom at all so I offered to send him some information about her.
Here's the letter I sent him:
Dear Father Bob,
My
sister Donna tells me that you will be doing the memorial service for my mother
Teresa Guzlowski, and that you might like some information about her.
I’m
not sure what my sister told you. But
here are some things I know about my mom.
My
mother was born in a village west of Lvov in Poland in
1922. She lived there with her mother
and father and sisters and brothers. Her
dad was a forest warden and they lived a quiet, peaceful life. She liked telling stories of what it was like
being a kid living near a forest. She
liked to pick mushrooms and sing and ride her pet pig Caroline. She liked to joke that the pig Caroline was
smarter than her brothers.
This
all changed of course when World War II started. In 1942, she was taken to a Nazi concentration
camp in Germany. She left behind her mother, his sister and
her sister’s baby, all killed by the Nazis and those who collaborated with
them.
For
the next 3 years she worked on the farms connected to the Buchenwald
Concentration District. She worked in
the fields and the barns. She said it
wasn’t a death camp, but rather a slow death camp. And she used to say that a lot of the pain
she felt later in life in her legs and back came from work she did in those
camps.
When
the war ended in 1945, she married my father Jan who had also been a slave
laborer, and the two of them lived in refugee camps in Germany until
1951. That year my parents, my sister
and I were allowed to immigrate to America.
When
we first got to the US, my
parents and my sister and I worked on a farm in upstate New York to pay off part of the money that
it cost to bring us to the states.
My
mother once told me a funny story about this time.
My
sister and I were 5 and 3 years old respectively. But we were still expected to work. One time we were picking straw berries and we
started complaining how hard the work was.
We started crying and begging our parents to let us go back to Germany and the
refugee camps. Life, we said, was easier
there. My mother told us that this was America and we had to stay here.
After
putting in a year on the farm, we came to Chicago
and lived in the Polish areas along Milwaukee
Avenue.
Both of my parents worked hard.
My mom worked in a factory, in a molding room where she would work with
hot plastic. The plastic would be
pressed into a mold to make telephone and such.
She would come home from work with burns on her arms from the plastic.
When
she died, the scars were still on her hands and arms.
I bet if you look in the coffin you will see them still.
Both
my parents worked hard at minimum wage jobs.
My mother often worked the midnight to 8 in the morning shift, so she
could be around when we were home. But
their hard work paid off, and they were able to buy a house and to send my
sister and me to Catholic grade schools and high schools. This education gave me a love for learning
that I’ve never lost and that led me to get a Ph.D. in English Literature and
to spend my life teaching others and trying to convey to them what my parents
taught me about the value of an education.
My
parents retired to Arizona
in the early 90s, and my dad died there in 1997.
Since then my mother lived alone, taking care of herself. She was fiercely independent and didn’t want
to be beholding to anyone. When she went
into the hospital that last time, she was still living alone, even though she
could hardly stand and every step took effort that would break some one with
less resolve.
In
summary, what I would like to say about my mom is that she was a very very
strong person. She survived the camps
and she survived a life of working on factory assembly lines and
in skyscrapers where she cleaned offices from midnight until 8 in the morning taking
out other people’s garbage and polishing the stains off of their desks. And she survived the sometimes turbulent
relationship she had with my dad and my sister and me.
If
you could have seen her when she was dying, you would have seen that same
desire to go on, to survive, even when there was little hope that she would
ever be able to walk or talk or hear or breathe the way she had before her
strokes. For the last two years, when
she and I talked, she would often say, “Johnny, how can I live without
hope?”
I
don’t know how she did it—but she did.
She lived without hope.
This
isn’t to say that she was a saint. A lot
of times when we think about those who die, especially when they suffered so
much in the concentration camps and had seen so much suffering in their own lives,
we want to eulogize them, talk about what was good and blessed in their lives;
but my mother wasn’t the kind of person who would want us to turn from the
truth. And the truth here was that her
experiences and her suffering made her hard and made her cold. I sometimes think that she may have survived
the war but what she left back in the camps was her heart.
73 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. In the six years that followed, more than five million Poles died.
A couple years ago, 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.
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.
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.
________________________________________________
The photograph of re-enactors in 1939 uniforms was taken by Mr. Mazowieckie at a re-enactment of the Bzura River Battle.
My friend Barry Koplan invited me to speak to his class about my parents and their experiences in World War II. Afterward, he wrote the following description of my visit and posted it at his blog The Poetscry:
Holocaust poetry, living memories “There’s a book, just published, of interviews with former Nazi soldiers,” said Dr. John Guzlowski, our guest speaker. John mentioned that the soldiers had been asked why they were willing to kill indiscriminately, why they followed brutal commands. Although I wanted to read the book, I wasn’t sure I would believe a single word in it.
What I did trust was John’s poetry about what his parents had endured as Polish Catholic prisoners in Nazi German work camps. “My Dad weighed seventy-five pounds when he was liberated. Do any of you remember when you weighed only that much?” he asked my class.
So softly spoken, John caused all of us to feel personally involved with the tragic experiences his parents had survived. Too many of his parents’ closest relatives and friends had been smashed or raped or viciously murdered while his parents were present. John’s father had lost the sight of an eye to the butt of a Nazi’s gun. As John read poems from his painfully brilliant collection, Lightning and Ashes, a mournful but appreciative pallor touched all of us.
Remarks about why the Holocaust atrocities happened were followed by details about the horrors survivors could not escape. “My Dad had such nightmares. He would scream in his sleep. On his death bed, he shouted fearfully; he thought Nazi doctors were in his room.”
Each poem was picture perfect and was absolutely heartbreaking. Every story John told reminded us that the Nazis had placed no value on their human conscripts. “Estimates are that 12,000,000 to 20,000,000 people, from Europe to Africa, had been captured. My Dad,” John said quietly, “saw his first black person, a fellow prisoner in the camps.” No one had escaped the reach of the Nazi collectors.
“The prisoners lived on less than 600 calories a day, yet they worked hard labor twelve to fourteen hours each day.” Such gruesome facts were followed by a story about John’s mother who was forced to harvest beets from frozen ground. “With her hands,” he told us, “and with no warm clothes.” She may not have had shoes.
For years, his mother wouldn’t talk about what had happened to her to John or his sister. “We were normal kids in a crazy house. It was just like the others in our neighborhood. Most who lived there were Polish Holocaust survivors.” He said that his father came home drunk “three or four times a week.” Not until years later, when he finally received help from a psychologist, was his father able to stop drinking.
“Dad never hesitated to talk about what happened. Mom kept quiet until Dad died. Then she told me to write down her stories. Even so, some of the worst, she never revealed.”
John read another poem about his dilemma about what he should or shouldn’t tell his children. “When I was a child, I know that my mother and Dad had different answers. Our house was insane. My sister married at eighteen to get away. She never wanted to hear the tragic stories. I wrote a poem about her, a poem she told me never to publish. She didn’t want to read it. I didn’t put it in my first collection, but I added it to my second one. And I sent her a copy.”
“How did she respond?” I asked. Everyone in the room was eager to hear John’s answer.
“She didn’t,” he said.
“What about your daughter?” I asked John. She teaches English at our public high school. “How does she feel about your poetry and your readings?”
He paused, then answered in a way that made us think she kept a safe distance from that part of John’s past.
I watched John, a man I’d known for years, as he tried to answer that query. That’s when I wondered about the impact of the Holocaust on third and fourth generation family members.
“Would your daughter speak to us?” I asked, gesturing to my students.
All eyes turned to John. “She might, if I’m not here,” he said. “I’ll ask her.”
I checked the time. To my surprise, more than two hours had passed. I dismissed my class, although many lingered. One student, a young Polish immigrant, spoke privately with John. Admittedly, I was curious about their conversation.
And I wondered whether John would be curious about what his daughter might tell our class about being the grandchild of Holocaust survivors. “Do you want to meet her?” I directed that question to my students.
They responded with an instant, “Yes!”
Later in the day, John’s daughter e-mailed me that she would visit us. Both she and I understood that her father wouldn’t appear with her. We agreed with John on that condition.
My students left the room; they seemed subdued. I sensed that many of them were trying to imagine what Friday’s class would bring.
When I was a child growing up in Chicago, All Souls Day wasn't a big deal. But in Poland it was. At least that's what my parents said. They 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, 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.
A piece by Anna Maria Mickiewicz about an observance in England is available here.
The photo is of an All Souls Day commemoration in Poland.
73 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. In the six years that followed, more than five million Poles died.
A couple years ago, 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.
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.
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.
________________________________________________
The photograph of re-enactors in 1939 uniforms was taken by Mr. Mazowieckie at a re-enactment of the Bzura River Battle.
