Echoes of Tattered Tongues: Memory Unfolded

My Parents' Experiences as Polish Slave Laborers in Nazi Germany and Displaced Persons after the War

Thursday, January 24, 2008

A Letter from Uncle Buddy

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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: Buc...
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Friday, January 11, 2008

What We Learned

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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...
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Wednesday, December 26, 2007

What My Father Believed

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Garrison Keillor's reading of my poem "What My Father Believed" from my book Lightning and Ashes is now available at the foll...
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Thursday, December 20, 2007

Christmas and Forgiveness

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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....
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Wednesday, November 21, 2007

Happy Thanksgiving Day

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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, ...
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Wednesday, November 14, 2007

Happy Places

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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 ...
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Tuesday, November 6, 2007

November 11, 1918--The Day World War I Ended

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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 ...
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About Me

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John Guzlowski
I was born in a refugee camp in Germany after World War II, and came with my parents Jan and Tekla and my sister Donna to the United States as Displaced Persons in 1951. My Polish Catholic parents had been slave laborers in Nazi Germany. Growing up in the immigrant and DP neighborhoods around Humboldt Park in Chicago, I met Jewish hardware store clerks with Auschwitz tattoos on their wrists, Polish cavalry officers who still mourned for their dead horses, and women who walked from Siberia to Iran to escape the Russians. My poems try to remember them and their voices. These poems have appeared in my chapbook Language of Mules and in both editions of Charles Fishman’s anthology of American poets on the Holocaust, Blood to Remember. Since retiring from teaching American Literature in 2005, I've written two new books about my parents. My new poems about them appear in my books Echoes of Tattered Tongues (Aquila Polonica, 2017) and True Confessions (Darkhouse Books, 2019).
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