Echoes of Tattered Tongues: Memory Unfolded

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

Sunday, July 31, 2011

The Warsaw Uprising, August 1, 1944

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On August 1, 1944, the Polish resistance and the people of Warsaw rose up to throw off the Nazi oppressors. The Poles fought with guns, bri...
6 comments:
Friday, July 15, 2011

What My Father Ate: A Reading

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My father spent more than 4 years in Buchenwald Concentration Camp as a Polish slave laborer. He was captured in a round up when he went t...
3 comments:
Friday, July 1, 2011

Beets: A Reading

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"Beets" is one of four poems I wrote after watching Schindler's List with my mother. She wasn't the kind of person to ta...
3 comments:
Monday, June 6, 2011

D-Day Remembrance

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Today, June 6, is the anniversary of the invasion of Europe, and by chance I was in a high school about to begin a presentation about my par...
1 comment:
Wednesday, May 25, 2011

What the War Taught My Mother

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This is a reading of "What the War Taught Her," a poem about my mother's experiences in the slave labor camps of Nazi Germany....
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Tuesday, May 24, 2011

Warsaw Rising--An Award Winning Video

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The Warsaw Uprising began on August 1, 1944, and lasted for 63 days. When the fighting stopped. The city was in ruins. A quarter of a mil...
1 comment:
Tuesday, April 26, 2011

Adolf Hitler's Suicide Day, April 30: A Poem

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66 years ago today, Adolf Hitler committed suicide. Some historians say he killed himself with a cyanide capsule, others say he shot himsel...
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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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