Lois P. Jones will be interviewing me Wednesday, August 10 at 830 PM PST on her program The Poets Cafe (KPFK Radio - Los Angeles 90.7 fm.)
Here's a piece of the blurb she wrote for the program:
One of my most profoundly moving interviews, please tune in to Poets Cafe with guest John Guzlowski who reads from Lightning and Ashes and Language of Mules. Works detailing his parents' experiences as Polish slave laborers in Nazi Germany.
His mother Tekla Hanczarek came from a small community west of Lviv in what was then Poland where her father was a forest warden. His father Jan was born in a farming community north of Poznań. John was born Zbigniew Guzlowski in a Displaced Persons camp in Vienenburg, Germany in 1948, and changed his name to John when he was naturalized as an American citizen.
Guzlowski writes "to remember his parents and their voices."
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There will be a temporary link to the show which stays on line for a few weeks at www.KPFK.org and then later, a permanent archive will be created at
Some of the best recent documentaries about the Nazis, their motivation, and the suffering they imposed are available for free from youtube.com. (The only down-side is that the documentaries are broken into segments that tend to be about 10 minutes long.) I would be happy to add other documentaries to this list. Just let me know what's available for free online.
I highly recommend the following:
The Nazis: A Warning From History BBC, part 1 (many interviews with German soldiers, politicians, and civilians about their attitudes toward the Nazis)
Auschwitz: The Nazis and the Final Solution BBC, part 1 (very well produced, includes re-enactments of key moments and interviews with former SS men who served at Auschwitz)
The Third Reich, part 1, from the History Channel (relies heavily on personal films and photographs)
The World at War: Inside the Third Reich, part 1 (Older BBC series, still compelling)
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, bricks, stolen grenades, sticks, and their hands and teeth. The Nazis retaliated with tanks, bombers, and fire.
63 days later the last Poles surrendered to the Germans.
250,000 men, women, and children were killed in the fighting, and the city of Warsaw was leveled by the Germans.
As a boy growing up, I would often hear my father talk about the fight the Poles made in the face of German military superiority. He would talk and sometimes he would weep for the dead.
My father wasn't there, of course. He had been taken by the Germans to Buchenwald Concentration Camp several years before. But when he talked about the Warsaw Uprising, he spoke like a man who had been touched by something that he would never forget.
I tried to capture this in a poem called "Cross of Polish Wood."
A CROSS OF POLISH WOOD
Told to take nothing he took the cross his mother gave him two clean planed strips made one by four nails and a figure in lead
But he didn't pray in the box cars he whispered and listened to whispers talk of Polish honor and the strength of lances of Anders and Sikorski and someone always said "Warsaw will never fall Panzers are only made of steel"
The fall of Warsaw taught him to pray sent him to his knees in Buchenwald to the nails and the lead and the clean-planed Polish wood
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 to his village north of Poznan to buy some rope. When he was taken by the Nazis, he was a kid, just 19 years old.
A lot of times when he talked about his experiences, he couldn't help telling me about how hungry he was for those four years. He said that most days he got about 500 calories of food. Once when he complained about the food, the Nazi guard hit him across the head with a club. From that day on, my dad was blind in one eye.
When the Americans liberated the camp, he weighed 75 pounds. He was one of the lucky ones. A lot of the guys in the camp didn't make it.
I've written a lot of poems about how hungry he was during those four year. The following is one of them. It's called "What He Ate." It appears in my book Lightning and Ashes. Here's a youtube of me reading the poem. I'm posting a copy of the poem itself after the video.
What My Father Ate
He ate what he couldn’t eat,
what his mother taught him not to:
brown grass, small chips of wood, the dirt
beneath his gray dark fingernails.
He ate the leaves off trees. He ate bark.
He ate the flies that tormented
the mules working in the fields.
He ate what would kill a man
in the normal course of his life:
leather buttons, cloth caps, anything
small enough to get into his mouth.
He ate roots. He ate newspaper.
In his slow clumsy hunger
he did what the birds did, picked
for oats or corn or any kind of seed
in the dry dung left by the cows.
And when there was nothing to eat
he’d search the ground for pebbles
and they would loosen his saliva
and he would swallow that.
And the other men did the same.
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The photograph at the start is by Margaret Bourke-White, an American woman reporter and photographer, one of the first people in Buchenwald after the liberation. Her story and some of her photos appear in her memoir of being with the advancing Allied army, Dear Fatherland, Rest Quietly (1946). The book is out of print but some libraries may still have a copy. You won't regret tracking it down.
"Beets" is one of four poems I wrote after watching Schindler's List with my mother. She wasn't the kind of person to talk about what had happened to her in the war, the way the Nazis killed her mother and sister and her sister's baby, and the years my mom spent as a slave laborer. Most of the time when I asked her about her past, she would wave me away and tell me simply a piece of wisdom she learned in the camps: "If they give you bread, eat it. If they beat you, run away."
This changed after we watched Schindler's List together. She liked the movie, thought it was powerful, but finally judged it inadequate. She said that no film could ever capture the things that happened in the camps. After saying that, she started telling me a series of stories about her life in the war. The poem "Beets" is one of those stories.
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"Beets" appears in my book Lightning and Ashes (available from Amazon and Steel Toe Books).
I posted another poem in this series about the stories my mom told about the slave labor camps earlier. It's called "What the War Taught Her" and you can see the reading by clicking here.
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 parents and their experiences in the Nazi concentration camps when an announcement came on asking the students in the school to remember the anniversary of D-Day.
As the speaker talked about what D-Day was, I thought about all that day meant to me, my parents' long years as Polish forced laborers in Nazi Germany, the refugee camps after the war, the family killed and left behind, our coming to the US as DPs.
When the announcement ended, I began my presentation with a poem about my father's liberation from the camps. Here's the poem:
In the Spring the War Ended
For a long time the war was not in the camps. My father worked in the fields and listened to the wind moving the grain, or a guard shouting a command far off, or a man dying.
But in the fall, my father heard the rumbling whisper of American planes, so high, like angels, cutting through the sky, a thunder even God in Heaven would have to listen to.
At last, one day he knew the war was there. In the door of the barracks stood a soldier, an American, short like a boy and frightened, and my father marveled at the miracle of his youth
and took his hands and embraced him and told him he loved him and his mother and father, and he would pray for all his children and even forgive him the sin of taking so long.
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The poem appears in my book Lightning and Ashes, about my parents' experiences during the war and afterward.
My daughter Lillian sent me the following link to color photos from before and after D-Day from Life Magazine. The photos are amazing, and a large part of that amazement comes from the color. The color gives me a shock, a good one--it takes away the distance, makes the photos and the people and places in them immediate in a profound way.
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. She spent 2 and a half years in those camps. The poem appeared in my book about my parents, Lightning and Ashes.
The reading is one of a series posted by Henryk Gajewski. To see more of the readings, click here.
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The Gajewski site also contains videos of Polish American writers Cecilia Woloch, Linda Nemec Foster, Mark Pawlak, Leonard Kress, and Phil Boiarski.
