New Poems about My Parents and the War

 War Literature and the Arts

Of The US Air Force Academy journal WLA just published 7 new poems of mine about my parents and their experiences in the German concentration and slave labor camps.  

The journal also published a prose piece of mine about growing up with two survivors.

Here’s the link.  Just click on the numbers in the image or on the word memoir.  

Here’s one of the poems.  

My Mother’s First Winter in Germany

My mother never thought she’d survive

that first winter in the slave labor camps.

She had no coat, no hat, no gloves,

just what she was wearing when the Germans

came to her home and killed my grandmother

and took my mother to the labor camps.

A German guard saved her life there.

He saw her struggling with her hands

to dig beets out of the frozen earth,

and he asked her if she could milk a cow.

She said, “Yes,” and he took her to the barn

where the cows were kept and raped her.

Later, the cows kept her from freezing

and gave my mother warm milk to drink

https://www.wlajournal.com/copy-of-draft-v37-landing-page

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Heaven?

When I get to heaven, I expect to find my mom & dad & my sister at the kitchen table in our old apartment on Evergreen St in Chicago.  

My sister will be 5 years old again.  

I'll be 3.  

My mom will put her perfect poppyseed cake on my plate and tell me to sit and enjoy.

A Call from a Dying Friend

I got a call yesterday from an old friend.  

He told me he is dying and only has a year or so more.  There is nothing the doctors can do.  

He asked me to send him a book he and I both loved when we were kids growing up. 

He knows I still have it. It’s Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs.  It’s a science fiction/fantasy novel about a man who “dies” here on earth and is reborn on Mars.

My copy of the book is old, maybe 60 years old. He touched it and I touched it.  Reading it as kids we turned its pages, wondered at its magic.  I wrote some notes in it.  He did too. I wonder what he’ll think when he sees those notes.

It's odd.  I've lost 5 of my good friends from childhood already.  They all went the same way, in silence, with no one near, only wives and lovers.  I wonder if this is the way it is.  Finally, the only bonds are the truest ones.

My God is God/Your God is the Devil

My God is God/Your God is the Devil

I grew up in a Catholic family.  Went to Catholic schools.  Even thought about being a priest at one time.  

I've always thought about God and how I see Him and how other people -- people who had a totally different world views -- see him.

This sense of the difference between how others see my god and how I view their gods has intensified in the last dozen or so years, especially after 9/11. 

I wrote a poem about it, and I've been thinking about it recently.

Here's the poem -- really two poems.

GODS

1.  My God is God

My God lives in heaven and He lives here

In my heart and the hearts of those around me.

His thoughts are pure and true and gentle, 

and his truest wish is to dream of babies 

playing in water soft as white roses.

When His lips come together in a smile 

The heavens smile too and the rains say

“Goodbye, goodbye, the sun is coming”

And when He smiles men are never hungry 

and their wives have eyes as soft as roses too.

And where my God is, there are no strangers,

only brothers who will take our hands

And kiss our cheeks for luck along the road,

No matter how hard it is, no matter how long.

2. Your God is the Devil

He wears a broken hat and dead men’s clothes

and he comes from a place where men are hungry

and children die in the dirt waiting for dawn.

Nothing your stupid god wishes for comes true:

If he prays for peace he gets cyclones,

twisters that shred his skin like razors

and rain sorrow on all who pray to him.

If he wishes for love among brothers

he gets brothers who spit at each other,

fathers who beat their sons on their weddings days, 

daughters who flaunt their evil shoes and dresses

before their mothers and holy grandmothers.

Your god is a straw thing who fears my boot

And what I can do to him with my hands.

—

The poem appears in my book of poems True Confessions, available from Amazon.

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.”

DON’T PICK YOUR NOSE!

“DON’T PICK YOUR NOSE!”

When I was a kid, I heard this all the time.  I heard it from my parents and the nuns and my friends.  I heard it in Polish and English, and I even heard it in Spanish from some neighbors.  

If you’ve ever picked your nose – and I’m sure you have – you’ll know it’s good advice because picking your nose will probably lead you down a dark, bloody street. That red stuff will come gushing out of your nose and down your chin and onto your shirt and your pants and the rug you’re standing on.  It will be one heck of a mess.

Why am I telling you this?  

It’s not because I’ve been picking my nose, but it is because I’ve recently had the worst nose bleed of my life.

Last Thursday night, I was talking to my wife Linda about our weekend plans.  She was suggesting we go to an art museum when my nose suddenly started bleeding.  I’m 76 years old, and I’ve had nose bleeds before.  I take a medicine called Eliquis for a vein problem I have.  One of its negative side effects is that I’m more susceptible to bleeding.  However, that didn’t bother me.   I knew what to do when the blood started coming.  I pinched my nose just below its bridge, and I held that pinch for 20 minutes.  Usually, this works.  It didn’t this time.    

No matter how hard I pinched my nose, the bleeding wouldn’t stop.  It didn’t stop after an hour, and it didn’t stop after 5 hours.   It kept dripping into the sink in fat, dark drops.

Linda said we had to go to the Emergency Room, and I knew she was right. I was losing too much blood.  We hopped into the car, and Linda drove to the hospital.  

All the while, I continued pinching my nose and worrying.  I’ve been to ERs before, and I knew what they were like.  The last time I was in an ER I was there because I had arthritis pain so bad that I couldn’t stand straight or move my arms without pain.  That time, I spent 8 hours waiting to see a doctor, and when I saw one, he advised me to see my regular doctor.

I was afraid this visit was going to be the same.

It wasn’t.

When I entered the emergency room, it was packed with people, but when I told the receptionist my nose had been bleeding for 5 hours, a doctor saw me almost immediately.  He said he had to put a nasal pack in my nose to stop the bleeding.  This pack was a tiny balloon covered by gauze.  He inserted it up my nose and inflated the balloon to exert pressure on the nasal blood vessels to stop them from bleeding.  

It worked!

For about 12 hours.  

Friday, I was in an urgent care seeing another doctor because somehow the balloon exerting pressure had gotten deflated and my nose was bleeding again.  He re-inflated the balloon. 

It worked!

For about 16 hours.

Saturday, I was back in the urgent care seeing the same doctor.  He determined the nasal pack was all screwed up, and he said he had to pull it out.

I said, “Please do!” My nose hadn’t been bleeding, but I’ve had pain from the moment I left the urgent care that first day.  The pressure of that nasal pack caused incredible pain in my nose, eyes, and head.  I felt like my body was swamped by migraines.  I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t rest, I couldn’t sleep. 

Taking the nasal pack out did the trick.  I spent the next day and a half sleeping, recovering from that pain.

Today, I saw another doctor for a follow-up visit.  

He was happy to hear I hadn’t bled for a couple of days and that I wasn’t experiencing any pain.

Smiling, I said, “I’m happy about that too.”

Smiling back, he said, “Let me give you one piece of advice.  Don’t pick your nose!” 

——

My latest column for the Dziennik Zwiazkowy.

My Books

My Books

I saw an article recently about the ten things that guys like to collect.  It was an interesting list because – for the most part – it was stuff I never considered collecting.  Here’s the list: Sports cards, coins, tools, knives, stamps, alcohol, car miniatures, figurines (stuff like action figures and pop icons), watches, and vinyl records.  

Some of these things I did collect for short periods in my life.  When I was a kid back in the 50s, I collected baseball cards one summer.  I also collected pennies for a while.  I tried to get one example of every penny minted between 1900 and 1962.  I was pretty successful.  I think I tracked down about 99 of the 150 different pennies minted in the US during those years.  I don’t know what happened to my baseball cards and the pennies.  Probably my mom swept them out of the house with a lot of the other stuff I dragged in.  

What I really love collecting are books! I’m 76 this year, and I’ve probably been collecting books for 69 years.  I’ve still got comic books I bought at Mandel’s soda shop and toy store on the corner of Potomac and Washtenaw back in 1957.  And those aren’t the only books I’ve still got.  

In my early teens, I became a crazy fan of science fiction novels, reading a sci fi book every couple of days, and then a little later I became a crazy fan of hard-boiled detective novels by writers like Mickey Spillane and Ross Macdonald, and then I became a crazier fan of the Beat writers like Kerouac and William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, and then I became a crazy fan of crazy postmodern novelists like Thomas Pynchon and John Barth, and then I became the biggest fan of great Polish writers like Milosz and Sienkiewicz and Szymborska and Isaac Bashevis Singer and so many others.

I not only read these authors I collected their books.

At one point, I had more than 4,000 books.

Some of these books I’ve been hauling around for almost 70 years.  I’ve still got books I bought in my teens and twenties at the Maxwell Street flea market, at dumpy book stores that were here today and gone tomorrow, at down and out second-hand stores in Chicago run by failed rabbis and fired university professors.  

Since I left Chicago in 1975 to go to graduate school in Indiana, I've hauled these books to 20 different apartments and houses my wife Linda and I have lived in.  I’ve hauled the books from Chicago to Lafayette, Indiana, to Normal, Illinois, to Charleston, Illinois, to Mobile, Alabama, to Peoria, Illinois, then back to Charleston, Illinois, and from there to Bowling Green, Kentucky, to Valdosta, Georgia to Danville, Virginia, and finally to Lynchburg, Virginia.  

Let me tell you, moving these books wasn’t ever easy.  One time when we moved from Mobile to Peoria we decided it was cheaper to mail the boxes of books rather than to rent a U-Haul truck that the 133 boxes of book would fit in.  This was back in the late 1980s and shipping a box of books cost about a buck fifty. 

At one point, just before we moved to Bowling Green, Kentucky, where my wife Linda got a job as the director of the writing program at Western Kentucky University, she persuaded me to start downsizing my collection of books.  

I hated to do it, but I did it anyway.  At least a little.  

And what did I do with the books?

I gave a lot of my books to my students.  Every two or three days, I would fill a couple of boxes with books that I figured I would never read or need again, and I placed the books outside my office door.  By the next day, the boxes were empty.  I also gave boxes and boxes of the books by Polish writers along with the  academic journals I had collected over the years to my university library.   

At one point, I even sold some of the rarer books on Amazon and Ebay. 

Despite all of this, I still have too many books today, enough to fill 8, 6-foot tall bookcases. I’ve dropped from 133 boxes of books down to about 30.  

Mostly, the books I have left are the ones that meant the most to me, the books by authors who reflected who I was and shaped who I have become.   And I walk past these books every day, and I stop and sit in the room the bookcases are in, and I read a chapter or two from one of the books that have shaped me and remember how important these books are to me,  and I wonder what will happen to them when I’m gone.  

I know my wife and my daughter and granddaughter know how much these books mean to me, but I also know keeping them and cherishing them because of how they shaped me so many years ago isn’t going to happen.  Perhaps my wife and my daughter and granddaughter will each take a book or two, but the rest will go where old books go.

To libraries or garage sales or Goodwill industries.

A Poem for Holocaust Remembrance Day

 A Poem for International Holocaust Remembrance Day

On January 27, 1945, the Soviet army came upon Auschwitz and its various camps and subcamps.  

What they found was terrible.

Afraid of anyone seeing what they had been doing in Auschwitz, the Germans went on a killing spree before the arrival of the Russians.  They also tried to blow up the ovens where the murdered had been burned for years.  

When the Russians arrived, they found corpses and 7000 starving prisoners.

A conservative estimate is that 1,000,000 people died there.  Two of the them were my mother's aunts, Polish girls who married two Jewish boys.  

Here is a poem I wrote about Auschwitz.  It is based on an incident Tadeusz Borowski, a survivor of Auschwitz, describes in his memoir This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen.  

I wrote the poem after a student at one of my readings asked me if I had one word for everything that happened in Auschwitz and the other German camps.  

The word was fear.

The poem appears in my book Echoes of Tattered Tongues, available from Amazon.  

Fear

During the war, there was only work and death.

The work broke you down, filled your stomach

with rocks and threw you in the river to drown.

The work shoved a bayonet up your ass

and twisted the blade till you were dead.

In the camps, there was only what we ate

and those we worked with—sometimes women.

But we never made love. I’ll tell you why.

Fear. I remember once a thousand men

were working a field with sticks, and trucks came

and dumped naked women in front of us.

Guards were whipping them to the ovens,

and the women screamed and cried to us, pleaded

with their arms stretched out—naked mothers,

daughters, and sisters, but not one man moved.

Not one. Fear will blind you, and tie you up

like nothing else. It’ll whisper, “Just stand still,

soon it will be over. Don’t worry, there’s nothing

you can do.” You will take this fear to the grave

with you. I can promise. And after the war,

it was the same. I saw things that were as bad

as what happened in the camps. I wish

I had had a gun there. I would have

pressed it here to my forehead, right here.

Better that than what I feel now. This fear.

—

The painting is by my friend Mieczyslaw Kasprzyk from his series of paintings of Dante’s Divine Comedy.

Death

When did you start thinking about death? 

Me?

I’ve always been thinking about it.  

When I was a kid, I loved to read novels and history books and watch movies about wars and combat.  My interest probably came to me from my parents.  They had both been slave laborers in Germany during World War II.  My mom didn’t talk much about her experiences and the deaths she saw, but my dad did.  During the 5 years he spent in Buchenwald concentration camp, he saw  friends starved to death, beaten to death, worked to death, and frozen to death. He wasn’t shy about sharing these experiences.  I remember listening to him tell me these stories when I was 6 years old.  

But when I was a kid, these stories about death didn’t bother me.  They were just like the deaths in the movies I loved.  It was different for my dad.  Telling me these stories, he’d often weep. But I didn’t.  Death was just a story to me.  I sat there listening to these stories and trying to picture them just like I watched war movies like All’s Quiet on the Western Front and John Wayne’s Sands of Iwo Jima.  These stories about death and dying were gripping and engaging, but they didn’t touch me emotionally the way my dad was touched by the stories he shared with me about the war. 

And then it all changed.  As I got older and older, death became more than a story someone told me.  Death became something that pressed against me, something that knocked on my door, something that wanted to spend more and more time with me, and not in a good way. Death became death.

I’m really not sure, but I think I started to feel death more as something real when my dad, the person who first told me about death, died.  He was diagnosed with Stage 4 liver cancer and died about two weeks after the diagnosis.  His death was terrible.  He had tremendous pain in his abdomen and his back, and the pain was so bad that it made him groan and try to crawl out of the bed and escape from the hospital.   The doctors gave him morphine to relieve the pain, but it just brought back so many memories of the terrible things he experienced in the war.   Holding his hand, weeping with him, trying to comfort him by singing the songs he loved to sing, I sat there sharing his misery for two weeks until he died. 

Death had never before been real to me.  It had always just been a story people told  to warn you about where life will take you, but it was always just that, a story in a book that you could close whenever you wanted to and just walk away from it.  

Now death started to be something much more than just a story.  Every death I’ve seen since my dad died has brought death closer to me.  I was with my mother when she was dying.  I was with my wife’s Uncle Charlie when he was dying.  I was with my wife’s mother Mabel when she was dying. And  there have been deaths I didn’t see, the deaths of so many of my life-long friends.  

All of those deaths have taught me one thing about death.  

Death is not just a story about misery and grief and loss and suffering you can walk away from.

—

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

DON’T!

 

DON’T!

I went to St. Fidelis, a Catholic grade school in Chicago, for 8 years from 1955 to 1962.  The school was run almost exclusively by nuns.  There was only one non-nun teacher.  Her name was Miss Hardman.  That’s right, Miss Hardman.  All of the kids thought her name was funny because all of the nuns were hard on us. 

The sisters were always telling us what to and what not to do.  They were always telling us not to sin, of course, but there were bunches of other things they were telling us not to do.  They told us not to talk unless you were asked to speak, not to comb your hair in class, not to sit near a girl if you were a boy, not to sit near a boy if you were a girl, not to laugh in class, not to take your eyes of the altar when you were in church, not to turn around and look behind you, not to chew gum in class, not to slouch when you were standing in line, not to lower your hands when you were praying, not to put your hands in your pockets when you were sitting in your seat, not to cry when the sisters spanked you, and never ever get into arguments with other kids in the class.

That was all a long long time ago, but sometimes I feel my world is becoming more and more like the world the sisters felt they needed to control.

Two recent occurrences got me thinking about this.

The first was an article I read from the Harvard Medical School.  It said that we shouldn’t shower daily because doing so affects our health, breaks down our immune system!  I’ve been showering daily probably for 40 years!  I was told for years that keeping the body clean improved my health.  Now I’m being told that’s a lie.

The next thing I read shook me up even more.  I read that drinking any amount of alcohol is bad for you.  I’ve been enjoying a couple of glasses of wine almost every night for 30 some years.  I was encouraged to do so by my doctors and just about everybody else.  They told me that doing so would help me live longer by protecting me from cancer, reducing my chance of heart attacks, and improving my mental health.

Now the World Health Organization is saying that “no level of alcohol consumption is safe for our health.” Alcohol is now being classified as a Group 1 carcinogen.  This puts alcohol in the same group of cancer-causing elements as asbestos, radiation, and tobacco.  Alcohol, the WHO says, causes at least seven types of cancer!  Not only does alcohol cause cancer, it also shrinks your brain!

When I read about how showering too much isn’t good for you, I thought I’d cut back on my showering.  No problem.  A shower every other day seemed doable.  However, when I read about how I should stop drinking wine, I was flabbergasted! I love having a couple of glasses of wine every night, but now I’m being told doing so will kill me! 

Reading about that shook me bad, but that wasn’t the end of it!

As I read about not showering and not drinking, I ran into a lot of articles about other things I shouldn’t do.  

What are those other things?

Don’t eat processed food!

Don’t eat late at night!

Don’t spend too much time sitting!

Don’t sleep at the wrong time of the day!

Don’t neglect your relationships with your friends and family members!

Don’t track storms more than four times a day!

Don’t spend too much time watching the news!

Don’t bite your fingernails!

When I came across the article about why I shouldn’t bite my fingernails, I stopped looking for articles about what I shouldn’t do.  I felt that each one was taking me deeper and deeper into the world of the sisters of St. Fidelis back in the 50s and early 60s, and that world was definitely not one I ever wanted to reenter.  

So what am I going to do about all of these people who are telling me what I should be doing?

I’m going to ignore them.

Somehow I’ve made it past my 76th birthday doing all the stuff I like to do.  

Hopefully, I’ll make it through a couple more, even if I bite my fingernails.

—

My latest column for the Dziennik Zwiazkowy.

If you want to read more of these columns, I’ve got a book of them available on Amazon!  Check it out.  

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