Echoes of Tattered Tongues: Memory Unfolded

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

Tuesday, February 13, 2018

A Valentine's Day Story -- How My Mom and Dad Met in a Slave Labor Camp

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My mom had been brought to Germany to work in a slave labor camp. The day she was captured she saw her mom and her sister and her siste...
Saturday, February 3, 2018

Subway Dreams

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Subway Dreams I lived at the end of the Ravenswood El in Chicago for years. All day and all night subway cars pulled into the termina...
Wednesday, January 17, 2018

True Confessions -- 1960s

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1960s I took acid 3 times, cocaine twice, pot about 3 times a week for 6 years, vodka/beer/tequila just about every day. I smoked...
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Thursday, November 16, 2017

1945: A Savage Peace

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This morning I watched 1945: A Savage Peace, a BBC documentary on what happened to the ethnic German civilians living in Eastern Europe...
1 comment:
Wednesday, November 15, 2017

Bad People

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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 ...
Tuesday, November 14, 2017

Found Book

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A Found Book You pick up a book of poetry off of one of the shelves in your study, and you wonder where it came from.  There’s nothing yo...
Thursday, October 19, 2017

First Snow in a Refugee Camp in Germany

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I still remember the first time I saw snow. I was almost three years old, living in a refugee camp in Germany. The snow fell thick an...
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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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