Remembering D-Day: June 6, 1944

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 millions of 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 day 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 when the Germans came to her village.  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 the Americans liberated my dad and the camps 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.

_______________________________

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.

Holocaust Remembrance Day 2012

Holocaust Remembrance Day (Yom HaShoah) begins in the evening of Wednesday, April 18, 2012, and ends in the evening of Thursday, April 19, 2012

I wrote the following blog a couple of years ago to commemorate 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.

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.

Talking about Home at the AWP 2012

One of the things that immigrant poets are always writing about is home.  We write about the homes we left behind, imagine what they were like back then and dream about what they're like now.  You see this in all the writers who left their home countries to come to America.  


This March 1 at 430 pm, I'll be talking about this idea of home at a panel with some other immigrant poets.  The occassion is the AWP conference in Chicago. 


The title of the panel is What is Home: The Poetics of Negotiating the Old, Reimagined and the New, Adopted Homeland, and I'll be there with poets Patricia Jabbeh Wesley, Raza Ali Hasan, Malena Morling, and Ilya Kaminsky. 


The session will be held in the State Ballroom at the Palmer House Hilton, 4th floor. If you're at the conference please stop by.  


By the way, here's the official description of the panel:  What is Home: The Poetics of Negotiating the Old, Reimagined and the New, Adopted Homeland


Political conflicts and wars often inspire immigrant poets to produce works rooted in two worlds: the old and the new, adopted homeland. The displaced poet arrives in America from Europe, Africa, or elsewhere, stuck in their old world, often with nostalgic, painful memories, looking for home on the new landscape. Is the new literature American, European, African, or just world literature? Our diverse panel will explore the poetics of negotiating the delicate spaces of home in our poetry.

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.

The Day My Mother Died

My mother died six years ago, January 27, 2006. She died in a hospice in Sun City, Arizona. It was a beautiful place, out in the desert, cactus and sage and rocks and reddish sand all around. She would have liked it. Before she got too sick, she used to like sitting outside and enjoying the little bit of desert that she had in her own back yard.

She had come a long way to die.

She was born in a forest outside a small village west of Lvov, Poland in 1922. She loved that forest and probably would have stayed there her whole life except for the Germans. They came to her house and killed her mother and her sister and her sister's baby. My mother fled into the woods, but the soldiers caught her and put her on a train that took her to a slave labor camp in Germany. Once I asked my mother to tell me what happened on that train. She said that even though I was a grown man and a professor, she saw things she couldn't tell me about.

For a long time, she also wouldn't tell me much about the slave labor camps in Germany. She would wave her hand at me and just say, "If they give you bread, you eat it. If they beat you, you run away." When she did start telling me about the things that happened in the camp, some times I had to ask her not to tell me.

At the end of the war, my mother met my father, another Pole who had been in the slave labor camps. 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 married and waited in the refugee camps in Germany until someone in America would agree to sponsor them so that they could come here. They waited for 6 years. During that time, they had two kids, my sister Danusha and me.

In June of 1951, we came to America. For a while my mom and dad worked on a farm to pay off their passage here. Then, we moved to Chicago, and my mom worked in a factory.

The way I remember it my Mom was always working, working in one factory or another and working around the houses she and my Dad bought. She would plaster walls, paint, sand floors, and varnish them too. There was no work that she wouldn't do.

When my parents retired, they finally moved out to Sun City, Arizona, a long way from the village in Poland my mom grew up in. After he died out there in 1997, she lived there alone, taking care of her house and the garden, making friends and thinking about her grandchildren.

I've written a lot of poems about her over the years, and since the day she died, I've been trying to write a poem about her dying. Let me tell you, it's not coming. I've got pages of notes and half starts for the poem, but for some reason none of the words and lines say what I want them to say about my mom and how I feel about her and how her death touched me. Maybe I'll be able to write the poem someday, but I can't do it right now.

So I want to end this with two of my favorite poems about my mom from my book Lightning and Ashes. The first one is called "What the War Taught Her," and the second is called "My Mother's Optimism."


What the War Taught Her


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

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

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

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

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



My Mother's Optimism


When she was seventy-eight years old
And the angel of death called to her
and told her the vaginal bleeding
that had been starting and stopping
like a crazy menopausal period
was ovarian cancer, she said to him,
“Listen Doctor, I don’t have to tell you
your job. If it’s cancer it’s cancer.
If you got to cut it out, you got to.”

After surgery, in the convalescent home
Among the old men crying for their mothers,
And the silent roommates waiting for death
she called me over to see her wound,
stapled and stitched, fourteen raw inches
from below her breasts to below her navel.
And when I said, “Mom, I don’t want to see it,”
She said, “Johnny, don't be such a baby.”

Six months later, at the end of her chemo,
my mother knows why the old men cry.
A few wiry strands of hair on head,
Her hands so weak she couldn’t hold a cup,
Her legs swollen and blotched with blue lesions,
She says, “I’ll get better. After his chemo,
Pauline’s second husband had ten more years.
He was playing golf and breaking down doors
When he died of a heart attack at ninety.”

Then my mom’s eyes lock on mine, and she says,
“You know, optimism is a crazy man’s mother.”

And she laughs.



______________________________

The first photo is my mom, my sister, and me in Riverview Amusement Park in Chicago, around 1957.

The second photo is of my mom and my daughter Lillian, around 1982.

Photographs by German Soldiers

Recently, I came across a site that features thousands of photographs taken by German Soldiers as they invaded Poland and spread across the country.  The site is called Bagnowka.   You can click here to enter it.  

The photos are mundane and touching, directed and random, unexpected and expected.  There are no captions, no explanations, so that I find myself wondering about them, about who took them and what happened to the person who took them and what happened to the people who appear in the photos.  Finally,  I realized I'll never know, and I just kept looking through the photos.

What I do know, however, is that the photos show me something of what life was like for the German invaders and the Poles who suffered the invasion.

You can look at the photos individually, and they are arranged in fourteen different groups: Sept. 1939, Children of War, Life in Wartime, Warsaw and other towns, Holocaust, Expulsion, Damages, Russia, War Prisoners, War Victims, Horses, Communism, Collaboration, and War Cemeteries.

Also, a number of  the photos have been gathered together as youtube videos under themes or topics accompanied by music.  Here's one of them, called Butchers of Warsaw.