OUR DEATHS

 OUR DEATHS

A couple years ago, I wrote a column for the Dziennik Zwiazkowy called My First Death.  It was about the first death I experienced. I was a kindergarten student at St. Hedwig Parish School.  One of my friends and his mother were run over by a drunk driver while waiting for a bus by the Congress theater on Milwaukee Avenue.  The death touched me a lot.  I was 5 years old and knew nothing about death and dying until that death.

What I didn’t know then was that my first death wasn’t going to be my last death.

Yesterday, I got a phone call from a good friend, a Chicago friend I’ve known for 60 years.  He is dying and wanted me to know. We talked about the books we loved back then, science fiction novels.  Those books brought us together, strengthened our friendship with their dreams for tomorrow and the world to come.

I couldn’t stop thinking about that call.  I woke up about 3 this morning thinking of all the people close to me who I’ve lost.  I never knew my grandparents.  They all died before I was born, but I’ve lost so many family members I’ve known: My mother and my father, my wife’s dad, his two brothers, my sister Donna’s husband Dennis who I knew since we were teens growing up near Humboldt Park, my wife’s sister’s husband Bill who loved to sing and play the guitar. 

And then there are my friends.  2005 and 2006 were bad death years.  I was in my mid 50s, and it was like the world wanted to teach me what was coming.  Three of my colleagues, people I taught with when I was a university professor, died.  Two died of cancer; one was a suicide. Then two of my best friends from childhood died.  

That was almost 20 years ago.  The dying hasn’t stopped.  Friends die, family members die. Writers who I’ve read and met and grown close to die. People I know only on social media die.

All those dead, and you and I both know they won’t stop.

—

Years ago, after my parents died, I wrote a poem of hope, a poem that spoke of my hope that someday I would be with my parents again.

Here’s the poem:

In Heaven

I will sit around the table

eating poppy-seed cake

and drinking coffee

with my mom and dad.

They will tell me all the things

they were afraid or forgot to tell me

when they were alive

But this will take only a moment

—real explanations never take longer

than that—and then my parents will turn

to the only questions that really matter

to the living and the dead.

Was the road hard?

Did you miss us?

—

The poem appears in my book about my parents Echoes of Tattered Tongues.

The article appeared in the Dziennik Zwiazkowy, Chicago’s Polish Daily. 

-

The Day I Was Born in a Refugee Camp — a Mother’s Day post

The Day I Was Born in the Refugee Camp: Prose Poem 

 My mother washed her face in cold water, tied her hair back, and put on an old dress. She said she knew my birth would be hard, that she had given birth before, to my sister, and that then the dirt had flushed out of her body like a rabid dog that had finally snapped its chain. She said as well there had been storms the day before I was born, and the creeks near the refugee camp were running high, and some of the barracks near the river were evacuated. 

She said she was alone that day I was born. My father had seen my sister Donna being born two years earlier, and he wept and said to my mother that he couldn’t go through that again. So she told him he should just leave, take the money they had and go buy himself some vodka or whiskey, find a barn he could crawl up into and drown himself in the drink, drown himself until he couldn’t hear her screams or see the mess that was coming. 

 There was no hospital, no doctor, no nurse, no midwife, no one with her to help her with the darkness and the screaming when I started to come. There was just me and the tearing in her stomach and her bones breaking apart like God had decided to squeeze her until she was nothing but blood exploding through her useless skin in His dirty hand. 

 And feeling it, feeling the river of shit and squeezing and bones breaking, she remembered the road that brought her there to that refugee camp in Germany and that darkness. She remembered the Germans who killed her mother and raped her sister and kicked her sister’s baby to death, and the years in the slave labor camp when the guards would promise her a potato if she would suck them, a piece of meat if she would fuck them, and she remembered being thankful for the food. 

 She remembered too the time after the war when the other women in the refugee camp struggled to hold on to their babies because they knew that giving birth to them would kill them because their wombs were still in the war, still weak and tortured and beaten, still kicked and stabbed and wounded, still bleeding and crying and hoping, still falling and slipping and starving, still kneeling and begging and weeping, still everything that had happened since the day the Germans put her and the girls from her village on the train to bring them to this Germany where every birth was a struggle in the mud for a breath. 

 And she screamed then and knew that screaming was useless, and so she screamed again and kept screaming until the flood came and my bones poured from her flesh like tomatoes exploding in the hands of a dirty God who didn’t care about what she remembered or feared or wept over. 

 She knew that all He wanted was to hold another life in His hand, and that nothing she could beg for could change the way He turned the baby, regarded it, and let it live and not

LENT!

Lent I went shopping one Wednesday afternoon about 40 days ago and was surprised no one had ashes on their foreheads. It was Ash Wednesday! Lynchburg, Virginia, where I live, doesn’t have a large Catholic population, but still, a lot of Christians observe Ash Wednesday, so I was expecting to see people with ashes on their foreheads to mark the start of Lent. When I got home, I contacted a few friends and asked if they had seen anyone with ashes on their foreheads. All my friends said the same thing. There were no ashes in sight. This surprised me. I grew up in St. Fidelis Parish, a Polish Catholic parish near Humboldt Park in Chicago, and Ash Wednesday was always a major event. You couldn’t go anywhere without seeing people with ashes on their foreheads. Lent was a major event back in the 1950s when I was growing up. As kids we had to do what the adults did. We were supposed to fast from eating meat on Ash Wednesday, every Friday during Lent, and Holy Saturday morning. There were also church services we had to attend. Every Friday, the nuns marched us to church where we had to kneel for an hour during the Stations of the Cross. If that wasn’t hard enough, the nuns expected each student to give up one thing he loved for Lent. My parents were strict believers in Lent. They didn’t limit my sister Donna and me to one thing. It was like my parents wanted to take all of the fun out of our lives. When I was a kid, I loved reading comic books and watching TV comedies like The Jack Benny Show and Gillian’s Island. All of that disappeared from my life during Lent. But that’s not all! I loved going to Saturday matinees at the local movie theater on Division street. Every Saturday, the theater would show one comedy like Jerry Lewis’s At War with the Army, one horror movie like Invasion of the Saucer Men, and twenty cartoons. During Lent, no matter how much I pleaded with my parents, cried, and banged my head on the floor, I was not allowed to go to the movies. Why were my parents so strict during Lent? It took me years to figure this out, but at 74, I know why they were so demanding. They made us give up what we loved because my parents gave up what they loved most. My mom loved to go dancing on weekends at bars and wedding receptions. During Lent, there was no dancing for her. While my mom loved dancing, my dad loved drinking. An alcoholic, he loved his vodka and pints of beer. During the 40 days of Lent, he was totally sober. If mom couldn’t dance and dad couldn’t drink, you could bet I couldn’t watch Jerry Lewis being stupid.

The Worst Things the Sisters Taught Us

 This last month, a couple of my columns have been about the good things I learned from the Sisters at St. Fidelis, my parish school in the Humboldt Park area.  I think the columns went over well.  In fact, I got my first fan letter ever after that first column about the parish school!

This week I want to complete the picture of what I learned in the Catholic parochial school I attended.  

Like I said in those previous columns, we learned great things.  We learned how to succeed in high school and college, how to be comfortable around people of the opposite sex, how to make and do things that have helped us throughout our lives, and how to develop friendships that have lasted for decades.

But we also learned and saw stuff that we wished we hadn’t.

A couple of the priests were pedophiles, and I’ve written about that here in the Dziennik Zwiazkowy before, and I’ve also written about it in my mystery novel Little Altar Boy.  I don’t think I need to drag that up again.

The other stuff we learned and saw that we wished we hadn’t mainly involves the meanness of some of the Sisters. Generally, the Sisters were good people, people devoted to their vocations, people devoted to teaching us.  There were several nuns, however, who weren’t good people. Some of our worst memories were of seeing kids in the class being punished by some of the nuns.  It didn’t happen often, but those memories stay with you.

We remembered boys kneeling in the front of the class with books balanced on their arms.  We remembered kneeling on a bag of hard peas with our arms reaching for the sky.  We remembered kneeling on our own hands.  

We remembered having our hair pulled by the nuns for laughing about something in class.  We remembered being whacked across the shoulders with a ruler for speaking without raising our hands first. We remembered being struck on our palms with a ruler for getting a math question wrong. 

We remembered being forced to stand at the front of the class sucking on pacifiers because we were acting like babies.  We remembered being told to put our heads on the desk and being hit on the head with a book.  We remembered a boy who did something to annoy a nun, and she punished him by sticking his head out the window and closing the window down on his neck.

There are those memories, memories that are hard to escape.

Today, if a teacher were to do these things, she would be fired, possibly arrested.  It wasn’t like that back then.  We assumed that the sisters had a right to whack us and yell at us and pull our hair and make us feel stupid.  We didn’t complain.

Thankfully, some things have changed in our schools

78th Anniversary of the Liberation of Auschwitz

On January 27, 1945, the Soviet army came upon Auschwitz and its various camps and subcamps.  

What they found was terrible.

Afraid of anyone seeing what they had been doing in Auschwitz, the Germans went on a killing spree before the arrival of the Russians.  They also tried to blow up the ovens where the murdered had been burned for years.  

When the Russians arrived, they found corpses and 7000 starving prisoners.

A conservative estimate is that 1,000,000 people died there.  Two of the them were my mother's aunts, Polish girls who married two Jewish boys.  

Here is a poem I wrote about Auschwitz.  It is based on an incident Tadeusz Borowski, a survivor of Auschwitz, describes in his memoir This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen.  

I wrote the poem after a student at one of my readings asked me if I had one word for everything that happened in Auschwitz and the other German camps.  

The word was fear.

The poem appears in my book Echoes of Tattered Tongues, available from Amazon.  

Fear

During the war, there was only work and death.

The work broke you down, filled your stomach

with rocks and threw you in the river to drown.

The work shoved a bayonet up your ass

and twisted the blade till you were dead.

In the camps, there was only what we ate

and those we worked with—sometimes women.

But we never made love. I’ll tell you why.

Fear. I remember once a thousand men

were working a field with sticks, and trucks came

and dumped naked women in front of us.

Guards were whipping them to the ovens,

and the women screamed and cried to us, pleaded

with their arms stretched out—naked mothers,

daughters, and sisters, but not one man moved.

Not one. Fear will blind you, and tie you up

like nothing else. It’ll whisper, “Just stand still,

soon it will be over. Don’t worry, there’s nothing

you can do.” You will take this fear to the grave

with you. I can promise. And after the war,

it was the same. I saw things that were as bad

as what happened in the camps. I wish

I had had a gun there. I would have

pressed it here to my forehead, right here.

Better that than what I feel now. This fear.

—

The painting is by my friend Mieczyslaw Kasprzyk from his series of paintings of Dante’s Divine Comedy

WHO AM I?

 Who Am I?

I was interviewed recently, and the interviewer asked a question I’ve never been asked by an interviewer.

He asked me who I am.

Personally, I feel that’s an impossible question to answer.

Let me explain why. 45 years ago, I did my PhD dissertation on the sense of the “self” in contemporary literature. The focus was on the “postmodern” notion that there is no definable “self.” According to my research, I cannot explain who I am. All I can give you is a sense of my “self” that is a fiction created out of the bits and pieces of my “self.”

So who am I?

Well, here’s the fiction I’ve created to answer that question: I’m a 74-year old guy with bad knees, vertigo, eyes that can’t focus, constant pain in my back, and two feet I’m always tripping over. My rheumatologist says my body is being taken over by a form of arthritis called “undifferentiated spondyloarthropathy” a mysterious disease affecting everything from my eyeballs to my toes.

But that’s not all I am. I’m also a writer who writes mystery novels, poems, and newspaper columns that have nothing to do with all that. I write about snow and sparrows, the world in the morning, the more mysterious world at night, the friends who are still here and wondering where I’ve gone to, and the friends who are waiting in their graves for my memories to give them some breath. I write about God and aging, my wife and my family, the way a door closes and the way a door waits to be opened. I write a lot about my mom and dad, the lives they had after they left the concentration camps. And I write about standing at a bus stop on the corner of Michigan Ave and Chicago waiting for a passing crucifixion just the way I did when I was a hippie 55 years ago.

So who else am I?

I’m also still what I once was: a kid born in a refugee camp after WWII, growing up in a Polish neighborhood in Chicago, listening to my mother telling me how she saw her mother raped and killed by the Germans, dreaming of Henryk Sienkiewicz and Władysław Reymont, listening to my father telling me about how he watched German soldiers stabbing women in their breasts with bayonets, going to schools and colleges, finding friends and losing friends, teaching and marrying and having a family like no family I had ever had, and growing and growing and growing.

And still that’s not who I am.

Just yesterday, a friend I had in 6th grade got in touch with me on Facebook. I haven’t spoken or written to this guy in more than 60 years. I asked him who I was in 6th grade. He wrote back, “You were a tall, skinny, bad boy.”

I was surprised. I think he had me confused with someone else. Or not.

—

My latest column for the Dziennik Zwiazkowy, the oldest Polish newspaper in America. 

Happy New Year!

 HAPPY NEW YEAR! 

My parents loved New Year’s Eve.

They loved dressing up in their fancy clothes. For weeks, my mom would search the department stores and dress shops on Milwaukee Avenue and Chicago Avenue looking for the most beautiful gown and shoes she could afford. For days, my dad would polish up his shoes again and again and make sure his best suit was free of any wrinkles and tears. They wanted to look as fancy as the Americans they dreamt of being.

They loved the spectacular ballroom they went to on New Year’s, the one in Wicker Park, on Wood Street just north of Division. They loved spending a long evening celebrating the coming year with their friends. These people – like my parents – were survivors. They survived the German invasion of Poland in 1939. They survived the years in the German slave labor camps. They survived seeing their mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers and friends killed by the Germans and the Russians. They survived the hardship of coming to America with nothing more than a wooden trunk filled with the few possessions they were able to gather together in the years they spent in the Displaced Persons camps in Germany waiting for some country like Canada or Australia or the United States to say finally, “Sure, we’ll let you come in, but it won’t be easy on you.”

My mother loved to dance the evening away. My father never learned to dance growing up, and so my mother would dance with anyone who looked like he or she was in need of a partner. She danced polkas and waltzes and tangos. She loved to hear the band on the stage play the old songs like “To ostatnia niedziela” and “Ada, to nie wypada” and “Dobranoc, kochanie” as she swirled around the dance floor with her friends and even strangers. 

Dancing, my mother would once again be the little girl who loved to dance with her sister Genja. My mother would once again be the girl she had been before the war killed her sister and ended all of her childhood.

And while my mom danced, my dad would sit at his table with his friends and talk about the war. They would talk a little about what they themselves suffered, but that wasn’t at the heart of their conversation. Whatever suffering they experienced was nothing compared to the suffering of those who hadn’t survived. My dad and his friends would sit at the table drinking their drinks and talking about the friends they had lost in the war, about Andrzej and Piotr and Janus and Antoni, about their suffering and bleeding and dying.

And dancing and drinking and sharing stories, my parents and their friends said goodbye to the year that had passed and embraced the year that was coming.

— 

My latest column for the Dziennik Zwiazkowy, the oldest Polish newspaper in America.

https://dziennikzwiazkowy.com/felietony2/szczesliwego-nowego-roku-happy-new-year-2/

-