Winter in America

Winters were hard when I was a kid in America. We were Polish refugees and immigrants, victims of Hitler and WWII, and we lived in shacks and apartments with two or three other families, apartments without heat or only a wood-burning stove in the kitchen.

It felt like it was always too cold and we didn't have enough to eat.

Winter and the cold seem to be a presence in a lot of the prose pieces and poems in my new book Echoes of Tattered Tongues, a book that includes a substantial section about what it was like for us here as immigrants.

Here's one of the poems from Echoes of Tattered Tongues about those immigrant winters.

All the Clichés About Poverty are True

Our first refugee winter in Chicago

my dad came home with a box of wood scraps

he traded some guy in a bar for a drink

and maybe a couple packs of cigarettes.

Me and my sister Danusha made houses

with those clean-smelling blocks and wedges,

pushed them around the floor like they were horses,

trains, and cowboys. My father that night

put them into the wood stove in the kitchen

for a little warmth, but it wasn’t enough.

My mom raised her hand and said she’d spank us

if we didn’t stop crying for the blocks.

I don’t remember what we did the next night.

Maybe we burned our crayons and chairs.

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Echoes will be published by Aquila Polonica. The book can be preordered from Amazon.

New Year's Poem

New Year's Poem

Hope is kind.

Hope is a door and a window.

Hope is the silly neighbor child we ignore when we are children ourselves.

Hope is the lesson learned too late.

Hope is Friday and Sunday morning.

Hope is a train going so fast that not even time can catch it.

Hope is the brother of sorrow, the sister of grief.

Hope is soft cows in a distant pasture of grass.

Hope is our mother.

My Mother's Death -- a sonnet

The Dead are Dead

Death was a wind and a flood.

It came in the night and it came in the light.

It broke the children and their parents, the mothers who smiled and the fathers who worked in the fields.

Death broke them and buried them and scattered dust over their graves and told a story about death and the road it takes to heaven.

The dead listened and wrote the stories down and kept them close to their hearts.

They knew a story is hope.

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The above is part of a sequence of poems called My Mother's Death -- a sonnet.  More of the poem appears at the James Franco Review.

A Story My Mother Told Me

My mother spent 3 years in the slave labor camps in Nazi Germany.  Here is a story she heard from one of the other Polish women there.


A Story My Mother Heard in the Slave Labor Camp

They took me from my children, three little ones, Jan was 3, Wlad 5, and Sasha 6.

They said the children would be useless on the farm in Germany. They were too young to do anything but cry and plead for food.

I begged the soldiers to let me take them with me. I said I could care for them and do the work both. I even dropped on my knees and wept, clung to their boots but they said no.

I asked them who would feed them, and they said that surely a neighbor would.

I couldn’t stop weeping, and they said if I didn’t stop they would shoot the children.

So I left them behind in Dębno.

Nazi Artifacts and Memorabilia

I was reading a fine essay by Matthew Vollmer about visiting the home of a man who collected Nazi artifacts and memorabilia, and it got me to remembering.

I had nazi relics/artifacts when I was a kid.

I was born in 1948 in a refugee camp in Germany, and I grew up in the 50s, in a neighborhood of Holocaust survivors and Polish refugees. I knew Polish cavalry officers, hardware store clerks with Auschwitz tattoos, men who had lost their hands in the Warsaw uprising, Polish women who had walked from Siberia to Iran to escape the Soviets.

My friends were the children of these people, and all of us had artifacts from the war--knives, arm bands, watches, gas masks, helmets, etc. We traded them, brought them home, played with them, never considering that our parents had been beaten and raped by the men who wore these things.

I remember one time, when I was probably 10, coming home with a dark blue Nazi helmet on my head. My father opened the door and started to weep.

SUFFERING

I've given a lot of thought and feeling to suffering over the years.  My father spent 4 years in a concentration camp in Nazi Germany, my mother spent three years there as a slave laborer.  They were people who knew genuine and constant suffering, suffering that they were afraid would not end until it killed them. My father had seen friends beaten, hanged, castrated and crucified.  My mom had seen her mom and sister raped and murdered, her sister's baby kicked to death.

Both of them carried the scars of the suffering all their lives.  My dad’s scars were psychological and physical.  My mom’s were mostly psychological.  Did the suffering make them better people, people closer to God, people uplifted?  I don’t think so. 

What the suffering taught them was that the world was too often a terrible place, a place where what you most held dear was liable to vanish in a cold wind.  I don’t think either of my parents thought that sorrow was a gift that God gives us.  My parents were uneducated people, farm people.  Suffering was a prod used to teach the recalcitrant horse or cow or mule to do what you wanted it to do.  If my parents were lucky, the guards in the labor camps would use suffering only this way, as a prod.

If my parents and the other people in the camps weren’t lucky, the guards would impose suffering just for the pleasure of it.  My father told me about the January night when the men from his barracks were chased out and made to stand in the snow and cold so that the guards could enjoy watching men fall to their knees and freeze to death. My mother told me about the woman guard who threw an infant into the wind and shot it for sport.

Suffering of all kinds was to be avoided.  

And what should you do if you see some one suffering?

Here's what my father taught me: 

He believed life is hard, and we should help each other.  If you see someone on a cross, his weight pulling him down and breaking his muscles, you should try to lift him, even if only for a minute, even though you know lifting won’t save him.

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Here's a link to more info about my forthcoming book about my parents: Echoes of Tattered Tongues: Memory Unfolded.

Paris

Bad People

People being evil?  Why do they do it?

I don't know.  But they seem to be doing it a lot more.  There was that book that came out last year or the year before about how civilization is more civilized than it was in the old days.

I find that hard to believe.  I remember giving a reading/presentation about my parents for a class of college students studying genocide.  I don't know if the students learned anything but I learned that more people have died of genocide since the UN establised it's policies against genocide in the early 1950s than died in the Holocaust.

I'm always astonished when I find out stuff like that.  I look around my house and my neighborhood and my city and my state and my country, and I see that sure there's some bad people here and there but where are the millions of bad people who are ready to kill millions of their neighbors.

One of my favorite journalists is Rszyard Kapuscinski (a Pole who grew up under communism)  who wrote a book called Shadow of the Sun about his travels among the genocidists of Africa.  He went here and he went there trying to track down the causes of the killing.  They were always absurd, meaningless, trivial.

What I took away from that book is that people can do bad things for the most absurd, meaningless, trivial reason and no law of God or man can stop them.

My father felt that all Germans were evil.  When I was a kid, he wouldn't let me play with kids with German names like Mueller or Rickert or Hauser.

Was he right?  I asked my mother what she thought of the Germans.  She said some were good, some bad.

I guess that's what we have to remember.  Some people can be bad, will be bad.

So here I am a 67 year old still trying to sort out the truths my parents left me.