Echoes of Tattered Tongues: Memory Unfolded

My Parents' Experiences as Polish Slave Laborers in Nazi Germany and Displaced Persons after the War

Tuesday, April 10, 2018

The Liberation of Buchenwald Concentration Camp, April 11, 1945

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On April 11, 1945, American troops liberated Buchnewald Concentration Camp.  It was a large camp housing about 80,000 prisoners, Poles, Sl...
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Friday, March 30, 2018

Easter Poem

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My father wasn't an educated man.  He was born on a small farm in western Poland and never attended school.  He used to joke that th...
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Monday, March 26, 2018

Solitude

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Solitude? Someone should write a history of it. Think about it. Probably for the first million plus years we were here on earth, we were up ...
Saturday, March 24, 2018

My Mother Remembers Her Mother's Death

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My Mother stopped speaking. The memory had caught her. One-minute she was there in front of me, telling me about the house in the woo...
Tuesday, March 20, 2018

Spring Poem

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Spring Poem My Polish father spent five years in the German concentration camp system. He was captured by the Germans in fall of 1940 a...
Monday, March 12, 2018

Hunger in the Slave Labor Camps

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My father spent more than 4 years in Buchenwald Concentration Camp as a Polish slave laborer. He was captured in a round up when he went to...
Tuesday, March 6, 2018

Last Day of Life on Earth

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The Last Day of Life on Earth 24. On the last day of life on earth, a little boy asked his mother for a drink of water, and she sm...
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About Me

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John Guzlowski
I was born in a refugee camp in Germany after World War II, and came with my parents Jan and Tekla and my sister Donna to the United States as Displaced Persons in 1951. My Polish Catholic parents had been slave laborers in Nazi Germany. Growing up in the immigrant and DP neighborhoods around Humboldt Park in Chicago, I met Jewish hardware store clerks with Auschwitz tattoos on their wrists, Polish cavalry officers who still mourned for their dead horses, and women who walked from Siberia to Iran to escape the Russians. My poems try to remember them and their voices. These poems have appeared in my chapbook Language of Mules and in both editions of Charles Fishman’s anthology of American poets on the Holocaust, Blood to Remember. Since retiring from teaching American Literature in 2005, I've written two new books about my parents. My new poems about them appear in my books Echoes of Tattered Tongues (Aquila Polonica, 2017) and True Confessions (Darkhouse Books, 2019).
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