Everyday I will Remember

Everyday I Will Remember by Christopher Kuhl

This excellent book of poems by Christopher Kuhl about his family and their experiences in the Holocaust is now on sale at Amazon for $3.29, marked down from $12.99.  When I saw that this price had been reduced so much, I couldn't believe it.

Here is a review I wrote of the book:

No single book or group of books will teach you about the Holocaust, what happened when the Germans decided to cleanse the earth of Jews and Gypsies and Poles and Gays and the people the Germans considered mules or subhumans or devils.

My mother spent 3 years in the concentration camps in Germany. When I would ask her what it was like, she would just say, “If they give you bread, eat it. If they beat you, run away.” Unsatisfied, I would press her for more, and when she would finally give in and speak, all she would say was, “You weren’t there. You will never understand.”

So where does that leave you and me, who weren’t in the camps, who will never know what it was like?

It leaves us wondering and asking questions and looking for the answers wherever we can find them. It leaves us reading books by those who survived, great writers like Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel and Viktor Frankel and Wladyslaw Szpilman and Olga Lengyel. And it leaves us reading books by writers who have somehow listened to the voices of those who survived and in those voices heard something that allows them to continue the legacy of those who survived and wrote about it.

Christopher Kuhl is such a writer.

Like the best of them – contemporary poets like Charles Fishman, William Heyen, and Cyrus Cassells – Christopher Kuhl blends stark moments of misery and death with a poetic vision that gives those moments an intensity that we will never forget.

We see this throughout his book Everyday I Will Remember. He tells us about those survived the camps and those who didn’t and what they saw and heard: the selections, the ovens, the bayonets in the ribs, the screaming, the diseases, the voices of the German soldiers, the dead children, the mass graves, the boxcars, the empty villages, the electric fences, the bodies piled so high.

But showing us the Holocaust is not all that Christopher Kuhl does. He helps us remember the Holocaust. He does this through his language, his images, his poet’s vision. This is most felt I think in those poems in the second half of the book, the section dealing with the time after the war, after the liberation from the camps. In this section, the survivors and the descendants of survivors are themselves seeking the words that will make some sense of the Holocaust.
We see this, for example, in the poem “A Mother’s Prayer to Her Son: Remember Me”:

I gather the wind
In the palm
Of my hand:

Son of my womb,
Son of my vows,

You have stirred my
Shadow to life . . . .

Christopher Kuhl also brings to his telling of the story of the Holocaust a poet’s gift for asking the ultimate questions the Holocaust forces us to ask.

Why did so many die? What do we owe a God who allowed this to happen? Why do such genocides go on and on? Why did the Germans do such terrible things? Do the dead know why they suffered? What is it like to be dead? How should we remember those who suffered?

And why should we remember them?
In an era where people are forgetting the Holocaust and questioning even whether it ever actually occurred, Christopher Kuhl reminds us as only a great poet can why we should never forget.

Click here to go to Amazon:

https://www.amazon.com/Everyday-Will-Remember-Christopher-Kuhl/dp/1643453157/

Dreams of Warsaw, 1939

The First Poem I Wrote about My Parents

I've been writing poems for about 37 years now.  I started when I was in grad school at Purdue working on my Ph.D.  It was a hot, humid August afternoon, and I was sitting at a desk thinking about Faulkner, trying to make sense of a line of imagery that seemed to thread through all of his novels.  I wasn't having any luck.

Out of nowhere, I had this sense of my parents and where they were and what they were doing.

It came as a shock this sense.  I hadn't  lived at home in almost a decade, seldom saw my parents, tried in fact not to think about them and their lives.  I didn't want to know about their worries, their memories of WWII and the slave labor camps and the mess those memories were making of their lives.   But suddenly there they were in my head, and for some reason I started writing about them.

I hadn't written a poem in at least a decade either, but there suddenly I was writing a poem.  And it wasn't the last.  This poem about my parents started me writing poems again, and I've never stopped.

Here's the poem:

Dreams of Poland, September l939

Too many fears
for a summer day
I regulate my thoughts
and my breathing
regard the humidity
and dream

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?"

Death in Poland
like death nowhere else‑‑

cool, gray, breathless

__________________

The poem appears in Echoes of Tattered Tongues.

The illustration above is by the Polish artist Voytek Luka.  It was done as an illustration for my book Third Winter of War: Buchenwald.

Holocaust Remembrance Day -- Yom HaShoah April 23-24

I can commemorate the Holocaust, but I can't do much more. I can't imagine it, I can't describe it, I can't understand it.

My parents weren't Jews. They weren't in the Holocaust. They were Polish Catholics who were taken to Germany to work as slave laborers in the concentration camps there. My dad spent four and a half years in Buchenwald, and my mom spent more than two years in a number of camps around Magdeburg. They suffered terribly, and they saw terrible things done to the people they loved. My mother's family was decimated. Her mother, her sister, and her sister's baby were killed outright by the Germans. My mother's two aunts were taken to Auschwitz with their Jewish husbands and died there.

I remember asking my mother once if she could explain to me what she felt in the worst month of her worst year in the slave labor camps in Germany. All she could say was, "you weren't there."

I wasn't there.

I've spent much of my life writing about the things that happened to my parents in the slave labor camps and reading about what happened in those camps and in the German death camps in Poland where so many Jews died, and still I will never be able to understand or comprehend what happened to the Jews in the Holocaust.

I went to Auschwitz in 1990 with my wife Linda and our daughter Lillian. We walked around, took pictures, tried to imagine what had happened there. We couldn't. We were just tourists.

I wrote a poem about it:

Tourists in Auschwitz

It’s a gray drizzly day
but still we take pictures:

Here we are by the mountain of shoes.
Here we are by a statue of people
working to death
pulling a cart full of stones.

Here we are by the wall where they shot
the rabbis and the priests
and the school children
and the trouble makers.

We walk around some too
but we see no one.

Later, we will have dinner
in the cafeteria at Auschwitz.

We will eat off aluminum plates
with aluminum knives and forks.
The beans will be hard,
and the bread will be tasteless.

But for right now, we take more pictures:

Here we are by the mountain of empty suitcases.
Here we are in front of the big ovens.
Here we are by the gate with the famous slogan.

Here we are in front of the pond
where the water is still gray from the ashes
the Germans dumped.

My Mother's Dreams in Wartime

My Mother's Dreams in Wartime

The world burns before our eyes,
and the smell of everything red
is on our skin.

We wait in line for bread
that never comes. We speak
to strangers thinking they will
tell us where our lives are.

We pray in the barracks
and the fields for the miracle
of hope.

____________________________

My mother survived more than 2 years in various labor and concentration camps in Germany.  She never thought she would.

Much of the writing in my book Echoes of Tattered Tongues describe her struggle to keep going.  

REPARATIONS

Recently, I was following a discussion on Facebook about reparations from the German Government to people who suffered in the concentration and slave labor camps in Nazi Germany. 

The discussion centered around whether or not financial reparations can actually compensation for that suffering.

The answer seems obvious to me, but let me tell you anyway.

There are no repayments, no restitution for what happened.

My mother was in the camps from 1942 on, my dad was in Buchenwald from 40 on.

She got a lump sum from the German government of about 1500 bucks and a monthly allowance starting in 1990 or so of $32 per month. When she died in 2006, the monthly check had increased to about $87.

The Germans were never able to find my father's paper work from his time as a slave laborer, so they said he had no proof that he was in concentration camp for almost 5 years.

A German guard had destroyed his eye and left a scar from one side of his head to the other. When my father died in 1997, they sewed his eye shut and puttied in the scar. The broken eye and scar were not sufficient evidence of incarceration.

Because he had no proof, he got no reparations. He spent a couple years working through various Polish legal aid groups trying to get reparations. He finally decided that the money he was spending to get the reparations wouldn't get him anything and he stopped pursuing reparations.

My mother used to say that the Germans killed her mother and her sister and her sister's baby, and put my mother in a slave labor camp for 3 years and then gave her 30 dollars a month for compensation. It wasn't enough. Nothing was enough.

Sometimes my mother would laugh about this.

By the way, just this past summer, 20 some years after my dad last applied for reparations from the Germans, the US Holocaust Museum sent me jpegs of 15 documents. A number of them prove that my dad was eligible for reparations.

I wonder why the German government couldn’t find them.

___________________________________________

The photo above of my mother, my sister, and me was taken by my father two years after we arrived as displaced persons in the US.

Here's a link to a wikipedia article on World War II war reparations.  Click here.

Remembering D-Day: 70th Anniversary

Today, June 6, is the anniversary of the Allied invasion of Europe.  It's a day that means a lot to me.  

My parents were two of the 15 million or so people who were swept up by the Nazis and taken to Germany to be slave laborers.  My mom  spent more than two years in forced labor camps, and my dad spent four years in Buchenwald Concentration Camp.  

Like almost every other Pole living in Europe at that time, they both lost family in the war.  My mom's mom, sister and infant niece were killed by the Germans when they came to her village.  Later, two of her aunts died with their husbands in Auschwitz.  

After the war both my parents lived in refugee camps for six years before they were allowed to come to the US.  My sister and I were born in those refugee camps.  June 6, 1944 was the day that long process of liberation for all of us began.

I've written a lot about my parents and their experiences, and here are two poems from my book Lightning and Ashes about those experiences.  The first poem is about what the war taught my mother; the second is about the spring day in 1945 when the Americans liberated my dad and the camp he was in:



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.

In the Spring the War Ended

For a long time the war was not in the camps.
My father worked in the fields and listened
to the wind moving the grain, or a guard 
shouting a command far off, or a man dying.

But in the fall, my father heard the rumbling 
whisper of American planes, so high, like 
angels, cutting through the sky, a thunder 
even God in Heaven would have to listen to.

At last, one day he knew the war was there.
In the door of the barracks stood a soldier, 
an American, short like a boy and frightened, 
and my father marveled at the miracle of his youth 

and took his hands and embraced him and told him 
he loved him and his mother and father,
and he would pray for all his children 
and even forgive him the sin of taking so long.

_______________________________

The boy soldier in the liberation poem is in part modeled after Michael Calendrillo, my wife's uncle.  He was one of the first American soldiers to help liberate a camp.  His testimony about what he saw in the camps was filmed for a documentary called Nightmare's End: The Liberation of the Camps.  You can see a youtube of him talking about what he saw in that camp by clicking here.  

Here's a link to a presentation I gave at St. Francis College about my parents and their experiences in World War II: Just click here.

My daughter Lillian sent me the following link to color photos from before and after D-Day from Life Magazine. The photos are amazing, and a large part of that amazement comes from the color. The color gives me a shock, a good one--it takes away the distance, makes the photos and the people and places in them immediate in a profound way. 

Here's the link: Life.

Remembering My Mom

My mother died seven years ago this January 18.  She died in a hospice in Sun City, Arizona.  

When she died, we had her funeral service near Darien, Illinois, where my sister Donna lives.  She made the arrangements for the services and the burial later up in Niles, Illinois, at St. Adalbert's Cemetery.

The priest who was going to perform the service was Father Bob, and he didn't know my mom at all so I offered to send him some information about her.  

Here's the letter I sent him: 

Dear Father Bob,

My sister Donna tells me that you will be doing the memorial service for my mother Teresa Guzlowski, and that you might like some information about her.

I’m not sure what my sister told you.  But here are some things I know about my mom. 

My mother was born in a village west of Lvov in Poland in 1922.  She lived there with her mother and father and sisters and brothers.  Her dad was a forest warden and they lived a quiet, peaceful life.  She liked telling stories of what it was like being a kid living near a forest.  She liked to pick mushrooms and sing and ride her pet pig Caroline.  She liked to joke that the pig Caroline was smarter than her brothers.

This all changed of course when World War II started.  In 1942, she was taken to a Nazi concentration camp in Germany.  She left behind her mother, his sister and her sister’s baby, all killed by the Nazis and those who collaborated with them. 

For the next 3 years she worked on the farms connected to the Buchenwald Concentration District.  She worked in the fields and the barns.  She said it wasn’t a death camp, but rather a slow death camp.  And she used to say that a lot of the pain she felt later in life in her legs and back came from work she did in those camps. 

When the war ended in 1945, she married my father Jan who had also been a slave laborer, and the two of them lived in refugee camps in Germany until 1951.  That year my parents, my sister and I were allowed to immigrate to America.

When we first got to the US, my parents and my sister and I worked on a farm in upstate New York to pay off part of the money that it cost to bring us to the states.

My mother once told me a funny story about this time. 

My sister and I were 5 and 3 years old respectively.  But we were still expected to work.  One time we were picking straw berries and we started complaining how hard the work was.  We started crying and begging our parents to let us go back to Germany and the refugee camps.  Life, we said, was easier there.  My mother told us that this was America and we had to stay here.

After putting in a year on the farm, we came to Chicago and lived in the Polish areas along Milwaukee Avenue.  Both of my parents worked hard.  My mom worked in a factory, in a molding room where she would work with hot plastic.  The plastic would be pressed into a mold to make telephone and such.  She would come home from work with burns on her arms from the plastic.

When she died, the scars were still on her hands and arms.  I bet if you look in the coffin you will see them still.

Both my parents worked hard at minimum wage jobs.  My mother often worked the midnight to 8 in the morning shift, so she could be around when we were home.  But their hard work paid off, and they were able to buy a house and to send my sister and me to Catholic grade schools and high schools.  This education gave me a love for learning that I’ve never lost and that led me to get a Ph.D. in English Literature and to spend my life teaching others and trying to convey to them what my parents taught me about the value of an education.

My parents retired to Arizona in the early 90s, and my dad died there in 1997.  Since then my mother lived alone, taking care of herself.  She was fiercely independent and didn’t want to be beholding to anyone.  When she went into the hospital that last time, she was still living alone, even though she could hardly stand and every step took effort that would break some one with less resolve.

In summary, what I would like to say about my mom is that she was a very very strong person.  She survived the camps and she survived a life of working on factory assembly lines and in skyscrapers where she cleaned offices from midnight until 8 in the morning taking out other people’s garbage and polishing the stains off of their desks.  And she survived the sometimes turbulent relationship she had with my dad and my sister and me.

If you could have seen her when she was dying, you would have seen that same desire to go on, to survive, even when there was little hope that she would ever be able to walk or talk or hear or breathe the way she had before her strokes.  For the last two years, when she and I talked, she would often say, “Johnny, how can I live without hope?” 

I don’t know how she did it—but she did.  She lived without hope.

This isn’t to say that she was a saint.  A lot of times when we think about those who die, especially when they suffered so much in the concentration camps and had seen so much suffering in their own lives, we want to eulogize them, talk about what was good and blessed in their lives; but my mother wasn’t the kind of person who would want us to turn from the truth.  And the truth here was that her experiences and her suffering made her hard and made her cold.  I sometimes think that she may have survived the war but what she left back in the camps was her heart. 

Here’s a poem I wrote about her:

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 book Lighting and Ashes tells the story of my parents.  You can also read some other blogs about my mom and dad:  

An earlier post about the day my mom died.  

Two Lives Shaped by World War Two: A Video

Valentine's Day: A World War Two Love Story

 

Landscape with Dead Horses, Sept. 1939

73 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.
________________________________________________

The photograph of re-enactors in 1939 uniforms was taken by Mr. Mazowieckie at a re-enactment of the Bzura River Battle.

Sept. 1, 1939: The Day World War II Started

73 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.
________________________________________________

The photograph of re-enactors in 1939 uniforms was taken by Mr. Mazowieckie at a re-enactment of the Bzura River Battle.

67th Anniversary of the Liberation of Buchenwald

April 11 was the 67th anniversary of the liberation of Buchenwald Concentration Camp.

My dad spent four and a half years there.  He was a farm kid living in Poland when he was captured by the Germans.  In the camp my father learned a lot of things, but one lesson stayed with him always.  As he used to say, “There is only work and death.” 

When he was liberated in the spring of 1945, he was dressed in rags, weighed about 75 pounds, and  only had one eye.  He had lost the other when a guard repeatedly clubbed him for complaining about the food.  

Here’s a poem I wrote about the day my father was liberated by the Americans.  It comes from Lightning and Ashes, my book about the experiences of both my parents in the German slave labor and concentration camps.

In the Spring the War Ended

For a long time the war was not in the camps.

My father worked in the fields and listened

to the wind moving the grain, or a guard

shouting a command far off, or a man dying.

But in the fall, my father heard the rumbling

whisper of American planes, so high, like

angels, cutting through the sky, a thunder

even God in Heaven would have to listen to.

At last, one spring day he knew the war was there.

In the door of the barracks stood a soldier,

an American, short like a boy and frightened,

and my father marveled at the miracle of his youth

and took his hands and embraced him and told him

he loved him and his mother and father,

and he would pray for all his children

and even forgive him the sin of taking so long.

____________________

My wife's Uncle Buddy Calendrillo was with Gen. Patton's army when they liberated the camps.  I've written about him and what liberating the camps meant to him.  You can read that post by clicking here.

The photo above was taken by Margaret Bourke-White, an American photographer who was one of the first reporters in the camps. She wrote a great book about her experiences called Dear Fatherland, Rest Quietly: A Report on the Collapse of Hitler's Thousand Years.

Valentine's Day: A World War II Love Story

My parents met in a concentration camp in Germany toward the end of World War II.

My mom had been brought to Germany by the Nazis to work in a slave labor camp. The day she was captured she saw her mom and her sister and her sister's baby killed by German soldiers. My mom was crying so much when she got to the camp that one of the guards said if she didn't stop crying they would shoot her.

Near the end of the war, my dad and some other slave laborers were brought to my mom's camp by German guards who were escaping the Russians. The Germans left him there and fled toward the American lines. When my mom saw my dad, he was a scarecrow in rags. He weighed about 70 pounds and had only one eye. He had lost the other when a guard clubbed him for begging for food.

She was 23, he was 25. She had been a slave for 2 years, he had been one for 4.

They met in that camp, and after liberation they did what a lot of people did. First, they had something to eat, and then they got married.

It was a hell of a marriage. They fought and argued for the next 50 years -- even on Sunday mornings -- and even on Christmas Day.

It got so bad at times that -- after we came to America -- my sister and I would plead with my parents to get a divorce.

They never did. When my dad died in 1997, they were still married. 52 years.

When I was about 57 or 58, I started wondering why they didn't get a divorce, why they stayed together through all the misery they put each other through. The answer to that question became a poem in my book about them, Lightning and Ashes. The poem is called "Why My Mother Stayed with My Father."

Why My Mother Stayed with My Father

She knew he was worthless the first time

she saw him in the camps: his blind eye,

his small size, the way his clothes carried

the smell of the dead men who wore them before.

In America she learned he couldn’t fix a leak

or drive a nail straight. He knew nothing

about the world, the way the planets moved,

the tides. The moon was just a hole in the sky,

electricity a mystery as great as death.

The first time lightning shorted the fuses,

he fell to his knees and prayed to Blessed Mary

to bring back the miracle of light and lamps.

He was a drunk too. Some Fridays he drank

his check away as soon as he left work.

When she’d see him stagger, she’d knock him down

and kick him till he wept. He wouldn’t crawl away.

He was too embarrassed. Sober, he’d beg

in the bars on Division for food or rent

till even the drunks and bartenders

took pity on this dumb polack.

My father was like that, but he stayed

with her through her madness in the camps

when she searched among the dead for her sister,

and he stayed when it came back in America.

Maybe this was why my mother stayed.

She knew only a man worthless as mud,

worthless as a broken dog would suffer

with her through all of her sorrow.

________

If you want to read more about my parents, you can check out a couple of the blogs here that talk mostly about them. One is called DPs in the Polish Triangle about what my mom and dad were like when they got to America. Another is called The Wooden Trunk We Carried With Us From Germany. There's also The Day My Mother Died.  

Just click on the above titles, and it will take you right to them.

Holocaust Remembrance Day

I can remember the Holocaust, but I can't do much more. I can't imagine it, I can't describe it, I can't understand it.

My parents weren't Jews. They weren't in the Holocaust. They were Polish Catholics who were taken to Germany to work as slave laborers in the concentration camps there. My dad spent four and a half years in Buchenwald, and my mom spent more than two years in a number of camps around Magdeburg. They suffered terribly, and they saw terrible things done to the people they loved. My mother's family was decimated. Her mother, her sister, and her sister's baby were killed outright by the Nazis. My mother's two aunts were taken to Auschwitz with their Jewish husbands and died there.

I remember asking my mother once if she could explain to me what she felt in the worst month of her worst year in the slave labor camps in Germany. All she could say was, you weren't there.

I wasn't there.

I've spent much of my life writing about the things that happened to my parents in the slave labor camps and reading about what happened in those camps and in the Nazi death camps in Poland where so many Jews died, and still I will never be able to understand or comprehend what happened to the Jews in the Holocaust.

I went to Auschwitz in 1990 with my wife Linda and our daughter Lillian. We walked around, took pictures, tried to imagine what had happened there. We couldn't. We were just tourists.

I wrote a poem about it:

Tourists in Auschwitz

It’s a gray drizzly day
but still we take pictures:

Here we are by the mountain of shoes.
Here we are by a statue of people
working to death
pulling a cart full of stones.

Here we are by the wall where they shot
the rabbis and the priests
and the school children
and the trouble makers.

We walk around some too
but we see no one.

Later, we will have dinner
in the cafeteria at Auschwitz.

We will eat off aluminum plates
with aluminum knives and forks.
The beans will be hard,
and the bread will be tasteless.

But for right now, we take more pictures:

Here we are by the mountain of empty suitcases.
Here we are in front of the big ovens.
Here we are by the gate with the famous slogan.

Here we are in front of the pond
where the water is still gray from the ashes
the Germans dumped.

Sept. 1, 1939: Commemoration

This September 1st marks the 70th anniversary of the Nazi invasion of Poland. This invasion and the subsequent invasion by their Soviet allies almost destroyed Poland. According to some historians, one out of six Poles died in the ensuing struggle.



The Polish Mission of the Orchard Lakes Schools, SS. Cyril and Methodius Seminary, and Michigan Polonia have organized a commemorative event for the first week of September. The event will allow those who witnessed World War II in Poland to share their memories with others. I'm honored to have been asked to be one of the speakers.



Further information about the commemoration is available at The Polish Mission site. You can also contact Ceil Wendt Jensen at ceil(at)polishmission.com [substitute @ for (at)].



_____

Last year, I posted a blog about Sept. 1 and what it means to me. The blog also features 3 youtube videos about the Nazi invasion. You can see all of that by clicking here.

Scholar Jan Peczkis has compiled a list of books about the Nazi and Soviet invasion of Poland. The list and Mr. Peczkis' comments on the individual books are available at the Amazon site.

World War II Through Polish Eyes

I recently heard from my friend Halina Koralewski, a Polish-American interested in making sure Americans know about Polish and Polish-American history. She told me that that she had just read a book called World War II Through Polish Eyes, and she wanted to recommend the book. It sounded interesting, and I asked her to write a piece about it for this blog so that others could hear about this book.

Here's what she wrote:

I just read the best book ever on Polish history, by M. B. Szonert - World War II Through Polish Eyes – a history of one Polish family (as well as the nation) before and during the war. What a great, great book. The family lost their relatives in the east, due to the Russian attack (which resulted in the deportation of Poles deep into Russia and Siberia).

After the war this part of Poland (almost ½ of its prewar land) was annexed to Russia and forever lost.

The boyfriend of Danusia (the protagonist in the book), a young Polish officer, was captured by the Russians in September of 1939. A couple of months later, in April 1940, he was executed along with 4,100 fellow Polish officers and 11,000 Polish government/administration officials, who were Poland's intellectual elite. These murders were all done on Stalin’s orders, and carried out by the NKVD (currently KGB), the infamous Soviet Secret police. The burial place of thousands of other Polish officers, also executed in 1940 by the Russians, is still unknown. This crime was never put to trial.

Also covered in the book is the Warsaw Uprising of August 1944, which is undoubtedly one of Poland's most heroic events, yet only a few lonely souls know of it. The Russian Army was on the other side of the Vistula River and didn’t help, while the Germans methodically suppressed the uprising, destroyed Warsaw, and murdered its citizens.

Another event is the battle of Monte Cassino – won by the Poles' famed Second Corpus after all other attempts by the Allied forces had failed. Roughly 1100 Polish soldiers lost their lives in this famous battle.

When the war ended, for Poland it was only the changing of an oppressor - from Germany to Russia. Although Poland fought Germany together with Allied forces, the West gave in to Stalin's demands and sacrificed Poland. Our best patriots, the Home Army fighters, were treated like criminals and executed by Russians. Russia in fact brought from Moscow their own puppet government that was never accepted by the majority of Poles. This terror continued until the Solidarity movement was born and eventually brought down communism.

What is both interesting and disturbing is that you will never find any of these facts in American history school textbooks.

In this particular book the family went through all the stages of Poland's troubled 20th century history and loses everything - only one family and so much suffering. A great, mind-opening book to read.

Poland was the only country in German-occupied Europe where there was an ultimate sacrifice - a death-sentence for helping Jews. Germans would kill Jews and Poles on the spot.

Nevertheless many Polish families helped their Jewish neighbors to survive in hiding. In Yad Vashem, where a tree is planted for each saved Jew, over 80% is attributed to the Poles, who were risking their own lives. Who indeed knows about it?

Poland's history and present is about forgiveness – yet how much can one nation forgive?

Ultimate Meaning in the Universe?

I gave a lecture recently at Benedictine Academy, a Catholic girls’ school, in Elizabeth, New Jersey.  I talked about my parents there and what they went through in the concentration camps during the war and what their lives were like after the war.  Near the end of my presentation, I read a poem that I posted recently on OpenSalon.  The poem is called "What The War Taught Her"; and it’s a bleak poem. 

One of the things it talks about is my mother’s sense that all of the suffering she and the other people in the camps experienced was finally “worthless.”  She believed that none of it did anybody any good.   During the question and answer period afterward, one of the high school girls asked me if what happened to my parents strengthened my faith or weakened it.   

It's a question that I think about all the time, but when you’re standing in front of a couple hundred young people and you know they have to get to their next class and that nobody’s got time for the long answer, you give them the short answer.   That’s what I did.  I told that student that I didn’t have any faith.   

I’ll never see that student again, and I’ll probably never get to Benedictine Academy again, but I wish I could.  It would give me the chance to give that student the long answer, and here’s what I’d say:     

When I posted “What the War Taught My Mother” at OpenSalon, one of the bloggers, Laurel, Not Lauren, asked me a similar question about my faith.  She said, "Tell me, in sifting through the rubble of so much evil and misery, have you come away with a sense that life has ultimate meaning, or are you a nihilist?"

“The ultimate meaning?” 

When I look at the kinds of things that have happened and continue to happen, I have to wonder if there is an "ultimate meaning" and if that ultimate meaning is a good thing.

I came across a quotation by the Chicago novelist and Nobel prize winner Saul Bellow a while ago, and he seems to express for me the dark vision of that ultimate meaning. Here's what he says:

“You think history is the history of loving hearts? You fool! Look at these millions of dead. Can you pity them? Feel for them? You can do nothing! There were too many. We burned them to ashes, we buried them with bulldozers. History is the history of cruelty, not love, as soft men think. We have experimented with every human capacity to see which is strong and admirable and have shown that none is. There is only practicality. If the old God exists, he must be a murderer. But the one true god is Death and history is made by madmen and butchers.”

When I read that, I think that maybe the ultimate meaning is that you and I and billions of others should be dead and the sooner the better. The ultimate meaning is that the only meaning is that we are here for a brief moment and it doesn't matter whether we suffer or not.

I consider that, and then I consider what my father and mother felt. My dad spent four years in a concentration camp, and he came out of that experience thinking that he had an obligation to be kind and helpful. I've written about this in my poem "What My Father Believed." You can hear Garrison Kellior read it online.

My mother, on the other hand, was a skeptic and a cynic. 100% of the time when I would ask her if there was some kind of ultimate meaning in the universe (and you can be certain I did ask) she would say, "No priest has ever come back from heaven to tell me if what the church says is true."

Despite this, she had a spoonful of optimism in her--A hopefulness that kept her going past the deaths she witnessed in the war, past the suffering in the camps, past two cancers that left her crippled for the last 4 years of her life.

When I once asked her after her second surgery for cancer how she could go on, she said, "Optimism is a crazy person's mother."

I think that optimism is my mother too.