International Holocaust Remembrance Day, Jan. 28

My father spent four years as a slave laborer in Nazi Germany, and my mother spent two and a half years there.  They were two of about 12 million people who were taken to Germany to do the work the Germans needed done while their own workforce was out trying to conquer Europe.

My parents weren't Jewish, but they knew people who were.  Poland was a country with a large Jewish population, and Jews had lived in Poland for almost a millenium.

Like I said, my parents knew Jewish people.  Two of my mom's aunts in fact married two Jewish fellows, twins.  The four of them died in Auschwitz.

Here's a poem I wrote about what my mom thought about the war and the things that happened.

WHAT THE WAR TAUGHT HER

My mother learned that sex is bad,

Men are worthless, it is always cold

And there is never enough to eat.

She learned that if you are stupid

With your hands you will not survive

The winter even if you survive the fall.

She learned that only the young survive

The camps.  The old are left in piles

Like worthless paper, and babies

Are scarce like chickens and bread.

She learned that the world is a broken place

Where no birds sing, and even angels

Cannot bear the sorrows God gives them.

She learned that you don't pray

Your enemies will not torment you. 

You only pray that they will not kill you.

My Mother and the Wolves

 

My mother grew up in a forest in Eastern Poland in the 1920s and 30s. She could hear wolves howling in the winter, and she listened to her mother's stories and warnings and passed them on to me.

This is a poem about the stories my grandmother told my mom.

My Mother and the Wolves

In their log house in the forests

west of Lvov, my grandmother

told my mother tales in the winter

to pry her thoughts from the sound

of trees splitting with the cold,

exploding with a crack like that

of her father's double-barreled shotgun

A cat, she would say, can't be trusted.

It comes in the short spring night

and sleeps on the priest's chest

watching his adam's apple

as if it were some mouse hidden

under a blanket of stubbled skin

and then striking its sudden claws

through his skin into cartilage

And what of the wolves, she'd ask,

the nine wolves that in the winter's

grey stone dawn would smash

their bones against the door,

hammering like hungry seals

until the door splinters and the baby

is got at – even from the cradle

even from its precious sleep?

And listen, Tekla, my mother's mother

would whisper then, there are men

as bad as wolves that no door

– no matter how solid the oak –

will keep out.

So trust in Jesus

in the world of clouds far beyond

the frozen forests of this frozen world

Do this always, and fear the greedy hens.

_________________________

My grandmother was shot to death by German soldiers.  They also killed my aunt and her infant daughter.   My mom was taken to Germany where she was a slave laborer  for almost three years.

The poem recently appeared in Main Street Rag.  

I write about my mom and her experiences in my book Lightning and Ashes.   Here's an amazon link to the book.  Just click here.

My Father's Birthday

 

My dad was born on Dec. 11, 1920 in Poland. By the time he was five years old, he was an orphan living on his uncle's small farm north of Poznan. In 1941, he was captured by the Nazis and taken to Germany. He spent four years in a concentration camp there. After the war, he spent another six years in refugee camps.

When he came to America finally, he had nothing with him but his family and the lessons he learned as a boy in Poland and Germany.

Here is a part of a poem about what it was like for him when he came to America. It's called "Looking for Work in America." It's from my book about him and my mom, Lightning and Ashes. 

LOOKING FOR WORK IN AMERICA

He knew death the way a blind man
knows his mother’s voice. He had walked
through villages in Poland and Germany

where only the old were left to search
for oats in the fields or beg the soldiers
for a cup of milk. He knew the dead,

the way they smelled and their dark full faces,
the clack of their teeth when they were desperate
to tell you of their lives. Once he watched

a woman in the moments before she died
take a stick and try to write her name
in the mud where she lay. He’d buried

children too, and he knew he could do any kind
of work a man could ask him to do.
He knew there was only work or death.

He could dig up beets and drag fallen trees
without bread or hope. The war taught him how.
He came to the States with this and his tools,

hands that had worked bricks and frozen mud
and knew the language the shit bosses spoke.

________________________

Here's a link to Garrison Keillor reading my poem "What My Father Believed."  Just click here. 

Piotr Florczyk on The Crooked Mirror : A Memoir of Polish-Jewish Reconciliation

One of the most criticized essays I ever wrote for this blog was entitled "All Holocausted Out: What I Think of Non-Jews Using the Word Holocaust."  The essay was about whether or not I could rightly describe my parents' experiences in the slave labor and concentrations camps of Nazi Germany as being a part of the Holocaust.  A number of readers felt strongly that I had no right to appropriate that term to talk about what happened to my parents.  These readers felt the Holocaust is a term that should only be applied to what happened to the Jews. 

I wasn't surprised by the reaction to my essay.  I've been following discussions by Jews and Poles about the Holocaust and World War II for years, and I knew that there were strong views on both sides about what happened during the war and about how those things that happened are perceived.  

I was grateful when Piotr Florczyk sent me a link to his L. A. Review of Books review of Louise Steinman's memoir on Polish-Jewish relations because it helped clarify for me what the controversy was and offered a way, hopefully, out of it.  

Here's his essay:

TO CALL THE POLISH-JEWISH RELATIONSHIP complicated would be an understatement, and to label it uneasy or acrimonious seems both inadequate and unfair. But we must use words  — aside from “long” — to describe the common history of the two peoples, which goes back to at least the 12th century. There was a time when Polish royals welcomed and encouraged Jews to settle in their land, which is one reason why Poland had been home to the largest and most vital Jewish community in all of Europe as recently as 100 years ago. What remains of that rich culture is of course paltry; the Nazis destroyed an 800-year-old community in six years. World War II spelled the end for 90 percent of Poland’s prewar Jewish community, among them some of humanity’s best and most promising scientists, academics, politicians, musicians, artists, and writers. While many acknowledge the profound crisis that has hung like a black cloud over Polish-Jewish relations since that time, few have provided any insight into how best to break the impasse.

It is the shape of Polish-Jewish relations in the present that concerns Louise Steinman. In the search for the remnants of her own family, she cannot help but trace and address the many unresolved issues that still stand in the way of a sustained dialogue between Poles and Jews, a dialogue that would at last put them on the path toward true reconciliation. Steinman’s book,The Crooked Mirror, will no doubt be part of that reconciliation.

Some people are forced to bear witness; others volunteer, as in the case of the journalist or relief worker. And others, like Steinman, are called back to witness something that can only be glimpsed by solemn digging. These kinds of witnesses offer their labor, their connection to others on a similar quest, and their profound feeling to the dead; what else can we do now that so few of the living witnesses remain?

“The Jews may have once been part of Poland’s body and soul, but they’d been excised, cast out,” writes Steinman. As a granddaughter of Polish-born parents, Steinman grew up feeling an animosity toward all things Polish deep within her family. Her mother could barely utter the name of the country. Rebecca, Steinman’s grandmother on her father’s side, told stories in heavily accented English about being smuggled into Poland from Ukraine in 1921 during that country’s civil war. But from the maternal side, radio silence. “Even as a child and without knowing why,” writes Steinman, “the absence of family history on my maternal side was a gap, an ache.” And so while she continued to live her life in Los Angeles, Steinman took up a second life as a historian on a series of journeys into Poland, a historian whose guiding questions were intensely personal and sometimes unclear even to her.

In her introductory chapter Steinman reminds us that “an estimated 80 percent of American Jews are of Polish-Jewish descent,” and she goes on to point out that most of them exude more animosity toward Poland than toward Germany, believing, erroneously, that the Nazis had set up their death camps in Poland because they could count on the locals to help them exterminate the Jews. Those Polish-Jews who survived the Holocaust only to be chased out of the country by their former neighbors wanted nothing to do with Poland; their experiences and the stories they told contributed to the image of Poles as most vile anti-Semites. Only the most intrepid, in both communities, have tried to find what unites rather than divides them.

It is Steinman’s Zen rabbi in Los Angeles who encourages her to get involved in establishing a dialogue between Poles and Jews. At first, she does not see this as her calling, but in the course of nine trips over a decade, she discovers a deep-seated affinity for Poles and the country as a whole. Much of this awakening stems from her working with Polish guides and translators in their 20s and 30s. These are the new ambassadors to Poland, so much more open and tolerant than their parents and grandparents. On her first visit, Steinman attends a Bearing Witness Retreat, held in the former Nazi death camp Auschwitz-Birkenau, where she participates in workshops with others from Poland, Germany, Switzerland, Great Britain, Italy, the Netherlands, France and Israel, most of them the children and grandchildren of survivors. One night they listened to the stories of a Polish actor who had worked as a slave laborer at the camp when he was 19. When the man characterized the Jews in the camp as more passive than the non-Jewish Poles, he angered many of the visitors. Immediately the group was plunged into the quandary of the book –– how to find a way to talk about the thorniest of subjects.

The language Steinman employs in this lyrical yet magisterial book testifies to the depths to which she’s gone, as both a researcher and someone marked by the Holocaust, to ask for and offer forgiveness and understanding. Recounting multiple trips to Radomsko, a provincial town in south-central Poland, in search of her family’s roots, she elucidates the more important points of general Polish history, including the three partitions at the end of the eighteenth century, after which the country disappeared from the map for 123 years, as well as the fact that “of all the countries in Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe, Poland was subjected to the most severe and sadistic repression.” Indeed for any Pole during World War II saving the life of a Jew meant risking the lives of everyone in his or her family. Yet among the nationalities bestowed with the title of “the Righteous Among the Nations” by Yad Vashem, the Israeli Center for Holocaust Research, Poles constitute the largest group. Some have tried to downplay the fact, pointing out the relatively small number of honored Poles, given the country’s total population and the size of its Jewish minority before the war, but Steinman refuses to play the statistics game, turning instead to a metaphor and asking “why does one person reject the view through the crooked mirror and another accept the distortion?” The answer lies at our fingertips, Steinman seems to suggest, yet remains stubbornly out of reach.  

 The convoluted, not to mention bloody, history of much of Central and Eastern Europe, including its peoples’ narratives of victimhood and resistance, is the key to understanding the deep-seated prejudices that divide the two communities. As part of her strategy to learn more about it, Steinman attended a kind of working retreat at Wannsee, outside of Berlin, where in early 1942 the Nazis had met to outline their plans for the Final Solution. The goal of the more recent gathering, organized by One by One, an organization founded in the 1990s by descendants of “survivors, perpetrators, bystanders, and resisters,” is to explore the legacy of the Holocaust and Hitler’s regime. The “conspiracy of silence” that prevailed in both West and East Germany after the war had also been in force in Poland, Steinman learns. This isn’t to suggest that Poles did not wage a heroic battle against both German and Soviet occupiers, which they did, and she says so; rather, what was absent from the postwar narrative is what had happened to the country’s Jewish citizens during and after the war. It was primarily the Nazis who had slaughtered them, of course, but there were also thousands of incidents in which local Poles, mainly peasants living in the countryside, killed Jews or otherwise contributed to the already miserable prospects they faced by either leading the Germans to their hideouts or barring them from returning to their homes after the war. While some of the perpetrators were tried and sentenced after the war, these shameful facts had been downplayed, and thus never entered the country’s postwar narrative, most of which continues to center around the Poles’ valiant struggle against their occupiers.

All this began to change after Jan Gross’s Neighbors was published in 2000. The book, written by a Polish-American historian, documents the killing of 600 Jews in the village of Jedwabne, on July 10, 1941; the victims were herded into a barn that was then set on fire. Gross made public that “the atrocity was perpetrated by the Jews’ Polish neighbors, not German soldiers, as had been previously assumed.” The ensuing dialogue in Poland has been compared to a “huge national psychotherapy session.” Writing in his 2007 bestseller Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland After Auschwitz, from which Steinman quotes, Gross offers a two-pronged explanation for why Poles turned on their neighbors: the Poles were betrayed by the Soviets — who arrested and deported thousands of Poles during the war, and in the aftermath of the war executed Poland’s Home Army heroes. The Jews returning from the camps were betrayed by Polish neighbors who appropriated their homes, property, and jobs. “A combination of greed and guilt made the sight of the returning Jews so threatening to their Polish neighbors,” writes Gross. At the ceremony marking the 60th anniversary of the Jedwabne massacre, in July 2001, the then Polish President Aleksander Kwaśniewski apologized “in the name of those Poles whose conscience is moved by that crime.”

Steinman compares the Poles’ response to Jedwabne to the massacre at My Lai, and our own country’s search for truth, while addressing the issue of collective punishment experienced by civilian populations of all armed conflicts as well as the selective amnesia that follows. In order to break taboos and open a dialogue, Steinman reaches out to the Poles she meets, and in no time discovers how much it pains some of them, including her guide and translator, that Jewish visitors to Poland focus only on the Holocaust rather than the centuries-long history of the Jews in the country. She responds — perhaps unaware that she’s echoing the Poles’ own oft-repeated summary of what had happened to them during World War II — that “those five years were not like any other five years,” to which her guide replies, “without those 800 years of Jewish life in Poland, you cannot understand what was lost in those five.”

Soon Steinman and another American Jew — who is herself struggling to come to terms with her own horrific family history and who becomes Steinman’s companion for many of the trips in and around Poland — meet with four university students. The issues that arise between them have been standard fare as points of contention. For instance, the young Poles rightly claim that there’s no shortage of events and organizations celebrating Jewish culture in Poland, citing as an example the hugely popular annual Jewish Culture Festival in Kraków, ”which is often criticized by Jews because it’s mostly attended by non-Jewish Poles.” One of the students contends that the main obstacle on the road to reconciliation is the fact that Jews perceive all Poles in an overwhelmingly negative light. Quoting the writer Eva Hoffman, whose own family left Poland after the government-led 1968 anti-Semitic purges, Steinman suggests that “the varied tonalities of feeling and opinion that must have existed in the long centuries of Polish-Jewish coexistence have been lost in the absence of actual contact.”

Ironically, there is perhaps no greater issue at present dividing the two communities than the March of the Living. Organized by Israeli government, these trips to Poland, during which young Jews visit the former concentration camps and ghettos, had until recently been off-limits to Poles, including Polish Jews living in Poland. What’s more, according to one Polish Jew living in Warsaw whom Steinman quotes, not only were the Israelis discouraged from meeting the locals, they came equipped with orientation fliers that stated something to the effect of “You shall see the local inhabitants. You shall hate them for their part in the atrocity. But you will pity them for their miserable living conditions.” While the fliers have been rewritten and the hateful language removed, the misunderstanding persists. The young Israelis see Poles as the embodiment of anti-Semitism, while Poles see the Israelis as ignorant of Poland’s culture and history in general.

A trip to Kolomyja, in today’s Ukraine, does not bring closure or relief for Steinman’s friend whose father was born in the town — in fact, it further magnifies the woman’s pain and desolation. Steinman’s repeated trips to Radomsko, her family’s long-ago home, turn out more fruitful. She meets many Poles, whom she calls “memory workers,” people involved in cultivating the memory of Jews — “not because they’re philo-Semitic but because they’re philo-Polish.” Touring the Radomsko Region Historical Museum, Steinman is initially dismayed that the exhibit commemorating the region’s Jews amounts to “just one glass case,” but then she’s reminded that before the case there was nothing, that the handful of artifacts is a sign that things have changed. Seeing school kids act in a Purim play, she comes to believe that the children perform as a way to “salvage an essential part of their own history.” Quoting the Egyptian writer Edmond Jabès, who, writing about Jewish heritage, eschewed continuity in favor of the phrase “permanent rupture,” Steinman writes, “I was the rupture. I was the continuity.” Indeed, she is both, and the same can be said about like-minded Poles; they “will never hear ‘thank you’ from the dead” for their work, but they need to hear it from us.

Coming to Poland against the wishes of their relatives, people like Steinman should be applauded for their willingness to face their own “unexamined prejudices.” Meeting the Other, understanding what has shaped his or her views, isn’t easy. Not all such journeys and encounters have positive outcomes, but many do. In Radomsko Steinman cuts the ceremonial ribbon at the opening of a new Radomsko Cultural Center, thus getting acknowledged as one of their own, a Radomsker. In L’viv, following a heartbreaking trip to Kolomyja, a Ukrainian woman embraces Steinman’s friend and whispers, “Welcome home.” At the Galicia Jewish Museum in Kraków, a photograph taken in a small village — in which a grove of trees in the middle of a plowed field marks the site of the Jewish cemetery — leads Steinman to conclude that “the presence of the past is kept alive by the observance of absence.” Some Poles may not be comfortable talking openly about what had happened to their Jewish neighbors, but they do remember it, and more and more are willing now to face what happened if only among themselves.

Appropriately, the variegated story told by Steinman has two endings. One leads the author back to her native Los Angeles, where she meets a distant relative who remembers the pre-war Radomsko. This woman “embodied all the dizzying polarities and contradictions of the historical debate between Jews and Poles. She’d been rescued by brave Christian Poles who risked their lives — and the lives of their families — to hide her. At war’s end, she’d been chased out of her home at gunpoint by venal profiteers.” The second ending leads Steinman back to Radomsko, where, in 2008, she takes part in dedicating a monument at the site of the Great Synagogue, commemorating the town’s Jewish community and the liquidation of its ghetto. It is this collective memory, as Steinman writes, quoting the Radomsk Yizkor, that links us to “the time when a Polish Catholic painted the zodiac on the ceiling of Radomsko’s Great Synagogue and a Polish Jewish tinsmith designed the spires of the town’s cathedral.” We are left to ponder the image of an elderly man, a Pole who rescued a Jew and has only recently been honored by Yad Vashem, standing side-by-side on a train platform with that Jew’s son. Steinman writes, “they had only met for the first time the day before, and yet they already knew each other so well.” One might add that while they share the past, it’s really looking forward to the future that unites them.

This overdue book couldn’t have been easy to write. Heartfelt, poignant, redemptive, and brave, it offers proof that Poles and Jews can lead a constructive dialogue. Poland is not free of anti-Semitism — perpetrated by people from all walks of life, but mainly those who missed out on political and economic opportunities brought about by the country’s transition to democracy and accession to the European Union, many of whom subscribe to the thinly-veiled xenophobic messages of Radio Maryja, a religious and socially conservative broadcasting service led by Father Tadeusz Rydzyk. For their part, many Jews continue to cling to various stereotypes of Poles, even though they have never actually met a Pole. Poland’s burgeoning Jewish community itself contradicts the message that in Poland “you come to visit death … then you travel back to Israel to see resurrection.” With remarkable generosity and an unwavering sense of purpose Louise Steinman writes about the people she meets and the places she visits in Warsaw, Kraków, Radomsko, Vilnius, Lublin, Sejny, Paris, Kolomyja, and L’viv, finding that things are in fact changing for the better. For those still unconvinced, this book is the proof and the way forward.

¤

Piotr Florczyk is a poet, essayist, and translator of six volumes of Polish poetry.

This review originally appeared in the L A Review of Books.  

Louise Steinman's The Crooked Mirror is available from Amazon.  

The Country of War: A Poem

This is a poem to be read while thinking about going to war to stop a war. 

The Country of War

War comes down
like a hammer, 
heavy and hard,
flattening the earth 

scorching it
as though a hot iron 
had been taken to it,

killing the soft things: 
children and horses
love and hope

killing the good 
of the earth,
the coolness 
of its creeks,
the look of trees 
uncurling
their leaves 
in late March 
or early April.

You smell 
this country
before you see it.

_______________________

The above poem is an early draft of a much longer poem that eventually was called "Landscape with Dead Horses."  It appears in my book Echoes of Tattered Tongues.    

Interview with Rattle Magazine

Recently, I was interview by Rattle's Megan Green.   The interview also appears at the Rattle site.  Just click here.  I thought I would post it here also.  

The following interview was conducted over email by Rattle editor Megan Green and John Guzlowski, author of Lightning and Ashes, a collection of poems that bear witness to his parents’ experiences as slave laborers in Nazi Germany.

Born in a refugee camp after World War II, JohnGuzlowski came with his family to the United States as a Displaced Person in 1951. His parents had been slave laborers in Nazi Germany. Growing up in the immigrant and refugee neighborhoods around Humboldt Park in Chicago, he met hardware store clerks with Auschwitz tattoos on their wrists, Polish cavalry officers who still mourned for their dead comrades and women who had walked from Siberia to Iran to escape the Russians. His poetry, fiction, and essays try to remember them and their voices.

His poems also remember his parents, who survived their slave labor experiences in Nazi Germany. A number of these poems appear in his booksLanguage of Mules, Lightning and Ashes (Steel Toe Books), and Third Winter of War: Buchenwal (Finishing Line Press).

Winner of the Illinois Arts Award for Poetry, short-listed for the Bakeless Award, and nominated for four Pushcart Prizes, John Guzlowski is a Professor Emeritus at Eastern Illinois University, and currently lives in Danville, Virginia.

____________

GREEN: In the epilogue, you write that you began thinking about your parents’ history when you were in graduate school. How old were you when you wrote the first of the poems in Lightning and Ashes? Were you able to speak with your parents about their stories as you wrote the book, or did you write about their experiences mostly from memory?

GUZLOWSKI: I didn’t start writing about my parents until I was 31 years old. Before that, I didn’t want to have any contact with them and their lives and what my mother used to call “that camp shit.” I grew up in a neighborhood in Chicago full of survivors and refugees, and as a kid growing up I felt hobbled by all that sorrow and all that difference, all that apartness. We were called DPs and that stood officially for Displaced Persons (people allowed into the US under the Displaced Persons act of 1947), but in the streets we were told repeatedly that DP stood for “dirty pigs” and “dirty Polacks.” I didn’t want to be a DP, a displaced person; I just wanted to be an anonymous American kid, a placed person.

School helped me get away from all of that DP world. In college and grad school, I turned to books and literature, a world where there were no survivors, no refugees. During all those college years, I seldom thought about the lives my parents had lived during the war. At least not until the very end of my college career.

I was a year short of finishing my dissertation on postmodern fiction when I wrote my first poem about my parents. I guess you could say that I had to be “placed” before I allowed myself to be “displaced.” I had to overcome their world, before I could enter it.

But even then, it was a slow process. It took me another 25 years to write the poems that became my book Lightning and Ashes.

GREEN: And where did those poems come from?

The first poem I wrote about my parents was “Dreams of Warsaw, September 1939,” and it gives a sense of where the poems come from. Here’s the second stanza:

Somewhere my parents
are still survivors
living unhurried lives
of unhurried memories:
the unclean sweep of a bayonet
through a young girl’s breast,
a body drooping over a rail fence,
the charred lips of the captain of lancers
whispering and steaming
“Where are the horses
where are the horses?”

GREEN: There are many mediums through which one might document the experiences in this book. Why did you choose poetry?

GUZLOWSKI: I hate to sound pretentious, but I think poetry chose me. There wasn’t a lot of choosing going around when I wrote that first poem about my parents. It just sort of happened. I was sitting at a desk working on an essay I was writing for a class, and the next thing I know I’ve written a poem. And then a year later, it happened again, and there’s a second poem, and then again, and there’s a third poem, and 20 years later I have 20 poems, and my mom sees Language and Mules, the chapbook I wrote about her and my dad, and she starts talking about her experiences and I start taking notes and seven years later I’ve written Lightning and Ashes.

Looking back on it, I can honestly say I’m happy poetry chose me to tell the story of my parents in a series of poems. The poems allowed me the possibility of conveying some of that sense of fragmentation that you get in trying to capture and convey memories. Take for instance the poems in Part III of Lightning and Ashes, “What the War Was Like.” There are two poems about the Nazis coming into a village and killing people, then a poem about neighbors who collaborated with the Nazis, then a poem about my mom being taken by boxcar to Germany, then a poem about my dad being taken to Germany, then my mom’s grief, then my dad’s hunger, then the castration of one of his friends, then my mom looking at herself and realizing that she’s worthless–and all of that flashes across the page quickly and terribly like lightning, one flash after another after another. No explanations, no summaries, just one terrible thing after another.

Maybe that’s the way it felt to me when my dad first started telling me these stories when I was a kid. I know that’s the way it felt when my mom picked up his stories 50 years later and gave me her version of the stories. One terrible thing after another, one flash of lightning after another.

I remember one of the last conversations she and I had about the war. She was 83 years old and dying of all the things she was dying from, and we were sitting in her living room in the evening and she was telling me about the war. This time, she was telling me about what it was like just before liberation. She was telling me what the German soldiers were doing to the girls in the camps. One terrible thing after another. And I looked up and saw that she was about to tell me something so terrible that it would just about be the worst thing I’ve ever heard, the last flash and stroke of lightning, and I said, “Mom, I don’t want to hear it.” And she said, “I’m going to tell you. You want to know what it was like, and I’m going to tell you.” And I said, “Please don’t tell me.” And she said, “I’m going to tell you,” and I said, “If you do, I’ll leave and not come back. I’ll stand up and leave and you won’t see me again.” And she said, “Okay, you’re 58 years old and still a baby, so I won’t tell you.”

GREEN: The line “hope is the cancer no drug can cure” from “My Father Dying” struck me, because it so contradicts the way most of us define hope—as a sort of karmic wish that will aid in bringing us what we want, rather than the role it serves in the book as a foolish and fruitless burden. It interests me that our society, while overtly acknowledging the horrors of the Holocaust, seems to take a sugarcoated view of it: our films about it often temper the overwhelming suffering with “the strength of the human spirit”; we tend to toss around words like “hope” and “courage” when we talk about it. Your book, however, is unflinchingly raw and honest, refusing to do the cheap work of shining artificial light on darkness. Do you agree that the American view of the experience of the Holocaust is overly redemptive? Was it a conscious decision to write about such horrific events in an unapologetic way?

GUZLOWSKI: I was brought up on those redemptive books and movies about the Holocaust and the world of survivors that was depicted in films like Exodus, Diary of Anne Frank, Life is Beautiful, and Schindler’s List. I remember watching Schindler’s Listwith my mother and asking her at the end of the movie what she thought. She looked at me as if I were an idiot and said, “They can’t make movies about what really happened.”

I’m sure hope and courage were important in the camps, but probably what was most important was luck. I asked both of my parents how they were able to survive the war, and they both said they didn’t know. My father didn’t know why he didn’t die when so many of his friends did. He once told a story about being hauled out of his barracks with hundreds of other prisoners for a roll call. It was a January night, snowing and below zero, and the men were in rags. The guards started doing a roll call, and as they read the names men began to drop from the cold, falling to their knees. A man here and another there and then more. When the guards finished the roll, there were dozens of dead prisoners in front of the barracks. But they didn’t let the men go back in the barracks. Instead, the guards started the roll again, and more men collapsed. That roll call went on for 6 hours. At the end, garbage trucks came to pick up the dead. My father didn’t know what kept him alive.

What I’m trying to do in the poems is stay true to my parents’ experiences. My mother was especially unsentimental about what happened to her. As a girl, she had seen her family killed, and then she went on to suffer for two and a half years as a slave laborer in Nazi Germany. After the war, she lived for 6 years in refugee camps, camps where they had mass graves for the babies that were born to the women following the war, women whose bodies weren’t strong enough to carry their pregnancies to fruition. I think it’s hard to believe in hope and courage when you have that kind of experience.

I hope you don’t mind but here’s a poem I wrote about my sense of what my mom believed:

WHAT THE WAR TAUGHT HER

My mother learned that sex is bad,
Men are worthless, it is always cold
And there is never enough to eat.

She learned that if you are stupid
With your hands you will not survive
The winter even if you survive the fall.

She learned that only the young survive
The camps. The old are left in piles
Like worthless paper, and babies
Are scarce like chickens and bread.

She learned that the world is a broken place
Where no birds sing, and even angels
Cannot bear the sorrows God gives them.

She learned that you don’t pray
Your enemies will not torment you.
You only pray that they will not kill you.

Of course, not everyone had the experiences my mom had. Some, I’m sure, survived through hope and courage. I’ve met and spoken to a lot of survivors over the years. What it’s taught me is that different people looked at what happened differently and tried to make sense of it differently.

GREEN: You mention that you were not especially interested in your parents’ lives as a child. Why did that change when you became a young adult? Did something trigger that interest or did it just naturally come with the maturity and distance that growing up bring?

GUZLOWSKI: As I mentioned in answering that first question, I needed to get some distance from my parents and their experiences. I described it earlier as being “hobbled.” There was all of that sorrow that my parents carried around. I started running away from that as soon as I could, and for much of my life I continued to run. As I started moving into my early teens, I didn’t want anything to do with my parents and their past. I thought of it as all of that “Polack” or immigrant past. It was sad/terrible and also so old world, so old-fashioned. I had parents who couldn’t speak English, couldn’t talk about baseball or movies, didn’t know anything about Elvis Presley or Marilyn Monroe or James Dean, couldn’t spend a night without fighting with each other in Polish, the language of misery, poverty, and alienation. I wanted to spend as little time as possible thinking about my parents and what my mother sometimes called “that camp shit.”

I think aging had something to do with the change in my attitudes. I started feeling something like “homesickness” for my own past and my parents’ past. I had been away from my parents’ home for almost 10 years when I wrote that first poem about them, “Dreams of Warsaw.” Writing it brought them close to me. And for all the years I worked on the poems that went into Lightning and Ashes that was one of the feelings that I always felt writing about my parents. That sense of closeness—writing the poems and talking to my parents about them. And now that they are both gone, I love reading the poems in front of a group because the poems bring my parents back to me, their voices, if only for a moment.

GREEN: You do justice to the power of the content of these poems by keeping the language simple, unembellished—where it would be tempting to be verbose and dramatic, the writing is conservative and unaffected. The narrative appears to speak for itself, which is a feat that requires great skill and discipline as a poet. How is the experience of writing poems that tell a true story, particularly when that story is largely comprised of other people’s histories? It seems to me almost comparable to translation, in that it must require certain creative limitations and a willingness to keep one’s own identity out of the focus.

GUZLOWSKI: Thank you.

The voice of the poems came pretty naturally. In talking about my parents’ lives, I’ve tried to use the language that I first heard their stories in, language free of emotions. When my mother and father told me many of the stories that became my poems, they spoke in plain language, straightforward language. They didn’t try to emphasize the emotional aspect of their experience; rather, they told their stories in a matter of fact way. This happened, they’d say, and then this happened: “The soldier kicked her, and then he shot her, and then he moved on to the next room.” I’ve also tried to make the poems story like, strong in narrative drive to convey the way they were first told to me.

Another thing about the voice of the poems that’s important to me is that I’ve tried to incorporate my parents’ actual voices into the poems. A number of the poems contain some of the language they told those stories in. The first poem in the Lightning and Ashes collection, “My Mother Reads My Poem ‘Cattle Train to Magdeburg,’” is pretty much written as she spoke it. I’ve cut out some of the things she said, polished others in that poem, but the poem has her voice.

The poem “My Mother’s Optimism” is another example of using my parents’ voices. The story of my mother’s cancers and her recovery that the poem includes is given a sense of reality, for me, because I included in the poem things my mom actually said. Here’s the end of the first stanza for example:

“Listen, Doctor, I don’t have to tell you
Your job. If it’s cancer it’s cancer.
If you got to cut it out, you got to.”

When my sister Donna read the collection, the first thing she commented on was how much she could hear our parents in it. To me, that was the greatest compliment she could pay. I wanted the poems to be about my parents, not about me talking about my parents.

I once gave a poetry reading, and during the Q & A afterward, a student asked me why I didn’t write about myself. It seemed like an odd question to me because the poems weren’t about me, didn’t pretend to be about me and my story.

GREEN: Are you working on any writing projects right now that you can tell us about?

GUZLOWSKI: I’m still writing poems about my parents, but I’m a slow poet. There’s a poem or two a year. Three of them appeared in War, Literature and the Arts, a journal produced at the Air Force Academy. You can read them at the journal’s website. Here’s the link.  Probably, there will be more poems too. I took notes of the conversations I had with my mom toward the end of her life, and sometimes I open those notebooks and find an image or a line of dialogue that wants to become a poem. I’m just finishing up a poem about how my mom and dad met at the end of the war.

I’m also working on two novels. One of them is called Suitcase Charlie, and it’s a crime procedural about a serial killer working in the survivor and immigrant neighborhood in Chicago that I grew up in. The other is called This Rough Magic, and it’s a fictional portrait of one of the Nazi soldiers who killed my grandmother, my aunt, and my aunt’s baby. The novel picks him up at the end of the war when he’s retreating from Russia and finally coming to feel guilt for the terrible things he’s done. I finished this novel two years ago and am happy to say that I finally found a publisher interested in it. Cervena Barva Press will have it out in 2015.

I wish my mother and father were still around to tell me what I got wrong in the novel.

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Sept 1, 1939: Landscape with Dead Horses

74 years ago on September 1. 1939, the Germans invaded Poland. Their blitzkrieg, their lightning war, came from the air and the sea and the sky. By Sept 28, Warsaw, the capital city of Poland, gave up. By October 7, the last Polish resistance inside Poland ended.  In the six years that followed, more than five million Poles died.

A couple years ago, I received an email from a friend passing on some links to US Army films of the invasion of Poland that were compiled from captured German films. I thought I would share these films of what the Blitzkrieg was like. They are in 3 parts (each about six minutes); and if you click on the part you want to see, you will be taken to the appropriate site.



Invasion of Poland, Part I



Invasion of Poland, Part II



Invasion of Poland, Part III

The world had not seen anything like it, and it was the prelude to a lot of things the world had never seen before: the Final Solution, Total War, the concentration camps, the atomic bomb, the fire bombing of civilian populations, and brutality on a level that most people still don't want to think about almost 70 years later.

When the Germans attacked on that September 1, My dad was 19 and working on his uncle's farm with his brother Roman. Their parents had died when the boys were young, and their uncle and aunt took them in and taught them how to farm, how to prepare the soil in the fall and plant the seeds in the spring. My mom was 17 and living with her parents and her sisters and brothers in a forest west of Lvov in eastern Poland.

The summer had been hot and dry, and both of my parents, like so many other Poles, were looking forward to the fall and the beginning of milder weather.

The war turned my parents' lives upside down. Nothing they planned or anticipated could have prepared them for what happened.

By the end of the war, they were both slave laborers in Nazi Germany, their homes destroyed, their families dead or scattered, their country taken over by the Soviet Union.




I've written a number of poems about the first days of the war and what happened to Poland, but none of those poems ever captured, I felt, the struggle of the Polish people to throw off the Nazi invasion.

A couple of years ago, I tried again to describe what my parents and the Poles of their generation felt. Here's the poem:


Landscape with Dead Horses

1.

War comes down like a hammer, heavy and hard
flattening the earth and killing the soft things:
horses and children, flowers and hope, love
and the smell of the farmers’earth, the coolness
of the creek, the look of trees as they uncurl
their leaves in late March and early April.
You smell the horses before you see them.

2.

Horses groan, their heads nailed to the ground
their bodies rocking crazily, groaning
like men trying to lift their heads for one
last breath, to breathe, to force cold air
into their shredded, burning lungs.
For these horses and the men who rode them,
this world will never again be the world
God made; and still they dare to raise their heads,
to force the air into their shredded lungs.

3.

Look at this horse. Its head torn from its body
by a shell. So much blood will teach you more
about the world than all the books in it.
This horse’s head will remake the world for you—
teach even God a lesson about the stones
that wait to rise in our hearts, cold and hard.

4.

In the end Hitler sat in his cold bunker
and asked his generals about his own horses,
“Where are they?” He asked, “Where are my horses?”
And no one dared to tell him, “They are dead
in the fields with the Poles and their horses,
bloated with death and burning with our corpses.”

________________________________________________

This poem originally appeared in War, Literature, and the Arts along with several other poems I wrote about Poland and the war. Here's a link to those poems. Click here.

By the way, in that same issue of WLA, there are also poems about war by Polish-American writers John Minczeski and Lisa Siedlarz.
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The photograph of re-enactors in 1939 uniforms was taken by Mr. Mazowieckie at a re-enactment of the Bzura River Battle.