Echoes of Tattered Tongues: Memory Unfolded

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

Friday, March 31, 2023

LENT!

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Lent I went shopping one Wednesday afternoon about 40 days ago and was surprised no one had ashes on their foreheads. It was Ash Wednesda...
Tuesday, March 14, 2023

The Worst Things the Sisters Taught Us

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  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...
Monday, January 23, 2023

78th Anniversary of the Liberation of Auschwitz

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On January 27, 1945, the Soviet army came upon Auschwitz and its various camps and subcamps.   What they found was terrible. Afraid of anyon...
Friday, January 20, 2023

WHO AM I?

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  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. ...
Saturday, January 7, 2023

Happy New Year!

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 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 departm...
Saturday, December 31, 2022

New Years Resolutions

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 New Year’s Resolutions I don’t know about you, but I’ve been making Resolutions for most of my life. I don’t remember when I started making...
Friday, December 23, 2022

Christmas Trees!

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CHRISTMAS TREES! I was talking to a friend yesterday about putting up Christmas decorations.  She was complaining about the time involved in...
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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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