Change

 Change

I start every day the same way.  After getting myself a cup of coffee, I open my iPad and check out my Facebook page.  I start with my memories and then move onto notifications from my Facebook friends and then end up scrolling through the posts that Facebook thinks are right for me.  

If you do Facebook, you know exactly what a lot of these posts are, mainly ads for things Facebook imagines I’ll be interested in.  In my case, it’s generally ads for hearing aids, cruises, or shaving kits.   I tend to scroll through all of this stuff quickly to get to the posts from the pages I’m really interested in.

Today, that’s where I ran into something that stopped me.  On Facebook’s “Growing Up in Chicago” page, I saw a photo of an old CTA bus with two metal trolley poles that stretched up to a pair of parallel, overhead wires.  These trolley buses relied on electricity to transport people. At their peak in the late 1950s, there were about 700 of these electric-powered coaches in Chicago.  That represented about one-quarter of the CTA’s transit vehicles, the others being regular motor buses and old streetcars.  

Seeing that trolley bus photo started me thinking about how Chicago has changed since the 1950s when I was a kid.  I haven’t been to Chicago since 2016 when I did a book tour to promote Echoes of Tattered Tongues, my book of essays and poems about my parents and their experiences in the slave labor camps in Germany and their lives in Chicago after the war.  I spent a week going to bookstores all over the city and reading from my book and autographing copies.  I even did some radio interviews on WBEZ and a Polish radio station.

But probably the most memorable thing that happened was returning to my old neighborhood east of Humboldt Park.  My family lived in that area for almost 23 years, from about 1952 to 1975.

For most of that time, the neighborhood was so Polish that my parents felt almost like they were back in Poland.  St. Fidelis, our local parish, had five priests.  All of them spoke Polish.  In fact, one of the priests, like us, came over as a Displaced Person after World War II.  He  could barely speak English.  The nuns at my school were all Polish Americans who spoke perfect Polish.  My parents felt right at home going to masses that were all in Polish and talking to the sisters in Polish about what a good boy I was.  

But that’s not all my parents loved about the neighborhood.  They loved the fact that about half the people on our block were either recent Polish immigrants or Polish immigrants from before the war.  Having lost so many family members and friends because of the war, my parents loved talking in Polish to these neighbors about the world they had left behind and the world they now lived in.  

My parents also loved shopping on Division Street.  The butcher shops, bakeries, clothing stores, restaurants, hardware stores, and taverns there were either run by Poles or had workers who spoke perfect Polish.   My parents loved going into places with signs on their windows that said, “Mówimy po Polsku.”

But then all of that changed just the way the CTA trolley buses changed.  By 1973 those 700 CTA trolley buses were gone, replaced by gas-powered buses.  And by 1975 when we moved out of that neighborhood, its Polishness hadn't disappeared, but there was less and less of it.  

Probably the biggest cause for the change was that St. Fidelis Church was demolished in 1968 because of structural problems.  The parish school eventually also closed its doors.  Another factor that contributed to the decline in Polishness was the fact that many of the Poles and Polish Americans in the neighborhood were starting to make more money and were moving into better neighborhoods.  A third cause was probably the increase of violence in the neighborhood stemming from Hispanic gangs.  On my block of Evergreen Street, five houses, including our home, were burned down by the gangs.

By 1975 when my parents finally moved out of the Humboldt Park area, it didn’t feel like the Poland they had been dragged out of by the Germans during the war, and it didn’t feel like the Polonia they had discovered when they first moved to Chicago in 1952.  My mother missed talking to her neighbors about how walking through Humboldt Park in the evening reminded her of what it was like growing up in a forest in eastern Poland before the war, and my father missed sitting with the other dipisi in a bar and sharing his memories of the war.  

The world had changed for them, just as it had changed for the other Poles and Polish Americans in our neighborhood, and just as it will continue to change for all of us.

We can’t stop that change.  

All we can hope to do is remember.

—

My most recent column for the Dziennik Zwiazkowy, the oldest Polish newspaper in America.

If you’re interested in seeing more of my columns about Chicago, check out my book Who I Am: Lives Told in Kitchen Polish, available at Amazon or from me.

Subhumans in America

 Subhumans in America

As the son of Polish immigrants—people who survived the hell of Nazi forced labor camps—I grew up with a deep conviction that words carry immense weight. My parents were told by the Germans that they and so many non-Germans were nothing more than mules.  My parents also heard themselves and the other people in the labor camps described as untermensch, a term meaning subhumans. 

This was a key pillar of German racial ideology.  Jews, Roma (Gypsies), and Slavic peoples (such as Poles, Ukrainians, Russians, and Belarusians) as well as persons with disabilities and Black individuals were all seen as being subhuman. This term wasn’t simply an insult.  It was used to strip specific groups of their humanity.  By defining certain groups of people as biologically inferior, the Nazi regime created the moral and legal justification for mass expulsion, enslavement, and extermination.  

My parents and other Poles not only experienced this hatred in Germany.  They experienced something like it when they came to America as Displaced Persons after World War II.  As a child growing up in Chicago in the 1950s, I remember walking around the Wicker Park area with my father hoping to find an apartment to rent and seeing signs on buildings saying that the owners would not rent to Poles.  Also, we were often told that DP, the acronym for Displaced Persons, was just another way of describing us as Damn Poles, Dirty Poles, Drunk Poles, and Dumb Poles.  After spending years in slave labor camps and refugee camps, we were seen as stupid and lazy people who had come to America as refugees just to get a free ride funded by American taxpayers.  Poles again were seen as untermensch, subhumans, nothing but mules.

What amazes me is that 70 years later here in America, I hear the same thing, not necessarily about Poles, but about other people who don’t fit the description of what an American should be like.  When I went to college in the late 1950s, I took a history course on the Constitution, and one of the things it taught me was that people are equal.  The 14th Amendment states that "...nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."  To me, this meant that all of us here in America were not untermensch, not subhumans.  We were all equally American.

I wish all Americans believed this.

Just a few days ago, I was reading about a lecture organized by the Maryland Federation of College Republicans that was given at Salisbury University, a state university in Maryland.  Jared Taylor—a self-described "white advocate" who is widely characterized by civil rights groups as a white supremacist—spoke on that campus on April 29, 2026. Arguing against cultural diversity, Taylor said that it is a form of weakness that creates national instability.  He also argued for racial segregation.  Whites should live apart from people of different cultures and races in order to preserve their own identities. Finally, he argued against immigration, saying it brings in people of different nationalities, cultures, races, and religions, and these differences will destroy America.  

Reading about Jared Taylor’s lecture, I thought about my parents and the Polish DPs I grew up with in Chicago.  So much of what he said brought back memories of how Poles were treated as untermensch by Nazi Germany and how we were treated by some Americans as Dumb Polacks when we came over from the refugee camps after the war.  

And I thought about something else.  I thought about the redistricting and gerrymandering that has gone on or is currently going on in 18 states prior to the midterm elections.  Most of the gerrymandering is by Republicans, and their intention seems pretty clear.  They want an America like the America “white advocate” Jared Taylor wants:  An America without diversity, an America of segregation, an America where immigrants are kept from our shores. 

They want an America that is not America.

—

My column first appeared in the Dziennik Zwiazkowy, the oldest Polish newspaper in America.

Christmas In the Concentration and Slave Camps

 CHRISTMAS IN THE CAMPS

I wanted to write something about Christmas for the Dziennik Zwiazkowy this year that I hadn’t written before.  I’ve been writing columns for the paper for 7 years now, and a number of these columns have been about Christmas.  I’ve written, for example, about our first Christmas in Chicago after we came from the DP camps in Germany, and I’ve written about what it was like buying Christmas trees with my parents in the neighborhoods around Humboldt Park when I was a kid, and I’ve written about what Christmas celebrations were like in our family in the 1950s.

Thumbing through those old columns, it suddenly occurred to me that there is one thing I had never written about.  

I had never written about what Christmas was like for my parents in the German camps during World War II.  My parents often spoke to my sister Donna and me about what Christmas was like when they were children living with their parents in Poland, but my parents never told us anything about what their Christmases were like when they were prisoners in the German concentration and slave labor camps.

When I first realized this, it surprised me because my parents weren’t silent about their experiences in the camps.  My father couldn’t stop talking about the terrible things that happened to him during his almost 5 years in Buchenwald.  He told me about friends who were starved, beaten to death, castrated, and crucified by the German guards.  He told me about seeing women having their breasts cut off by German soldiers.  Although mother was less open about her experiences, she shared stories about seeing women raped and babies murdered in the slave labor camps.    

My mom and dad told me these terrible stories, so why didn’t they tell me about what Christmas was like in the camps?

The answer is pretty obvious, and I felt it as soon as I asked myself the question.

Researching this question, I found that Christmases in the camps – not surprisingly – were hell doubled down over and over.  

The German guards seldom allowed for any kind of celebration of Christmas by the prisoners.  Mostly, the guards wanted the prisoners and slave laborers to do what they did every day, work in the freezing cold until they could not work anymore.  There are also stories of the guards doing perverse and disturbing things to the prisoners during the Christmas season.  In one photograph from Buchenwald, a pile of bodies appears near a series of Christmas wreaths.  In another camp, prisoners were ordered to carry soil, and those who did not carry enough were shot.  Some of those who were shot were piled under a Christmas tree.  In another camp, prisoners were called out into the freezing cold to sing Christmas carols, and they sang there until they froze to death.

Despite this violent abuse by the guards, some prisoners in the camps struggled to make the day feel like Christmas.  They exchanged small gifts, things like pieces of bread or Christmas greetings that they printed on pieces of paper they found in the dirt.  Other prisoners gathered together in the barracks late on Christmas Eve to sing a hushed Christmas carol or share some cherished Christmas memories or say a silent prayer.  The lucky prisoners and slave laborers did this without the guards finding out.  The unlucky ones were beaten or killed.  

Reading through these accounts of what Christmas was like in the slave labor and concentration camps, I immediately came to understand why my parents never shared such memories with my sister Donna and me.  My parents were protecting us from the world they experienced and survived.  They didn’t want us to live with the grief and suffering and pain they knew so well and would never be able to shake free from. 

My parents’ silence was the best Christmas present they could give us.

— 

My latest column for the Dziennik Zwiazkowy, the oldest Polish paper in America.

My Dad was an Alcoholic

My dad didn’t drink during World War II.  He was a Polish slave laborer in Buchenwald Concentration Camp for four years, and in the camps there wasn’t much drinking or even eating.  Right after the camps were liberated, however, he searched for something to drink and found it.  Later in the refugee camps that he and my mom spent six years in, he ran a still and made booze as soon as he could set one up.

He drank for the next 30 years.  He didn’t drink on weekdays.  Weekdays were for working and making the money that the family needed to live in America.  He was absolutely sober those days.  He wouldn’t touch a drop.  

Weekends, however, were different. When I was a kid, I didn’t understand why he drank, but now I do.  My dad drank because he was trying to push back the memory of all the terrible things he had seen in the war.  He hoped that the drinking would cut him off from his memories and from the outside world.  He wanted to isolate himself in that piece of himself that hadn't seen men castrated, women bayoneted in the breast, babies thrown in the air and shot.  He never found that peaceful place.  

So he drank.  Fridays when he came home from the factory where he worked, he would go to the kitchen and take out a bottle of vodka and fill a glass and sit down at the table and drink.  If anyone was in the kitchen with him, he would smile at them and say “to your health.”  He would finish that glass and then take another and another.  He would drink until he passed out.  Saturday, he would begin with beer in the morning and switch to vodka in the afternoon.  Sundays, after church, he’d go to the bar on the corner for his Sunday drink, a free glass of booze that would lead to another and another.  

The peace that he sought never came.  No matter how much he drank, the memories of the war still haunted him.  Sometimes, when he would pass out from the drinking, we could hear him in his sleep weeping or screaming from those memories.  

When he was 56 he realized that the drinking wasn’t helping him, and he sought out a psychiatrist.  He gave him Librium, a medication that’s supposed to relieve anxiety.  It didn't help my dad.  He went back to drinking, and the drinking got so bad that the psychiatrist talked about the possibility that my dad would have to be committed to an asylum of some kind.  

What finally saved him from drinking was my mom telling him she would leave him if he continued to drink.  He couldn't stand that thought.  Her leaving would have been his end, his suicide.  

She was his church

The Day I was Born in a Refugee Camp

The Day I Was Born in a Refugee Camp after the War

My mother washed her face in cold water, tied her hair back, and put on an old dress. 

She said she knew my birth would be hard, that she had given birth before, to my sister, and that then the dirt had flushed out of her body like a rabid dog that had finally snapped its chain. She said as well that there had been storms the day before I was born and that the creeks near the refugee camp were running high and that some of the barracks near the river were evacuated.

Except for the nurse, my mother was alone that day I was born. My father had seen my sister Danusha being born two years earlier, and he wept and said to my mother that he couldn’t go through that again. So she told him he should just leave, take the money they had and go buy himself some vodka, find a barn he could crawl up into and drown himself in the drink, until he couldn’t hear her screams or see the mess that was coming.

It didn’t matter that she was alone.  No one could really help her with the darkness and the screaming when I started to come. There was just me and the tearing in her stomach and her bones breaking apart like life had decided to squeeze her until she was nothing but blood exploding through her useless skin.

And feeling it, feeling that river of shit and the squeezing and the bones breaking, my mother remembered the road that brought her there to that Displaced Persons camp in Germany and that darkness.

She remembered the Germans who killed her mother and raped her sister and kicked her sister’s baby to death, and the years in the slave labor camp when the guards would promise her a potato if she would suck them, or a piece of meat if she would fuck them, and she remembered being thankful for the food.

She remembered too the time right after the war when the other women in the refugee camp struggled to hold on to their babies because they knew that giving birth to them would kill them because their wombs were still in the war, still weak and tortured and beaten, still kicked and stabbed and wounded, still bleeding and crying and hoping, still falling and slipping and starving, still kneeling and begging and weeping, still everything that had happened since the day the Germans put her and the girls from her village on the train to bring them to this Germany where every birth was a struggle in the mud for a breath.

And she screamed then and knew that screaming was useless, and so she screamed again and kept screaming until the flood came and my bones poured from her flesh like tomatoes exploding in the hands of a God who didn’t care about what she remembered or feared or wept over.

She knew that all God wanted was to hold another life in His hand, and that nothing she could beg for could change the way He turned the baby, regarded it, and let it live or not.

—

From Echoes of Tattered Tongues, a book about parents and the war.  Available on Amazon.

A Veteran’s Day Prose Poem

Only the  Dead

 

At first, the men of the burial battalion had tried to bury the dead.  

They dug big trenches and deep ditches, and threw the bodies in, and covered them with lime.  

Then, the chaplain came and prayed over them, and told the dead they would always be remembered and that when the war was over their bodies would be dug up again and taken back home and re-buried where their mothers and fathers and sweethearts could pray and cry and tremble over them, and where Jesus would find them when he came on his golden chariot at the end of time. 

But then the whistling bombs and shrapnel started falling and the bodies and graves became unstuck, and the explosives churned them up like mashed potatoes, churned them into a brown and gray muck of decaying bodies and mud.  

And now the ground was frozen, and the burial battalion was gone, and the chaplain was dead or busy somewhere else praying over the dying who would soon be lying like the others on the frozen ground waiting for the snow to blow over them.

— 

From my novel Retreat — a love story.

Talking to My Mother

 Talking to My Mother

I remember one of the last conversations my mom and I had about the war. I had come to visit her in Arizona where she and I made retired.  

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, her life in the slave labor camps. 

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 from the notes I was taking 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.”