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John
Guzlowski’s poetry, fiction, and essays have appeared in The
Ontario Review, Chattahoochee Review, Modern Fiction Studies,
Nimrod, Margie, Exquisite Corpse and other journals here and in
Europe. His poems about his Polish parents’ experiences in Nazi
concentration camps appear in his books Language of Mules,
Lighting and Ashes, and Third Winter of War: Buchenwald. Third
Winter was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. He blogs
about his parents and their lives at http://lightning-and-ashes.blogspot.com/
MY
MOTHER TALKS ABOUT THE SLAVE LABOR CAMPS
1. LIBERATION
She has the peasants' view of the world:
Disorder and chaos, roads that end
In marshy fields, chickens that begin
To bleed from the mouth for no reason.
Nobody makes movies of such lives
She says, and begins to tell me the story
Of when the Americans first came,
Of the sergeant who stood with a suitcase
In the yard between the barracks.
He was shouting, screaming.
They didn't know what he wanted
And feared him. One of the women
Came out (first, she hid her children
Under the bed) and then another.
They knew he wasn't a German.
When fifteen of them stood in the yard,
He opened the suitcase, emptied
Its deutsche marks on the ground,
Said in broken German, "This is for you,
Take it, this is the money they owe you."
And then the British came,
And put them in another camp,
Where the corpses still had not been buried,
Where the water was bad, where my mother
Got sick, where her stool was as red
As the beets she had to dig everyday.
And my father worked hard, sawing
The wood, getting ready for winter,
Like he did in Poland. He knew this work
And did it for her and the children,
My sister and me. But the British
Moved them again, to another camp,
And they had to leave the wood, even though
My father tried to carry some on his back.
And it was cold in the new place, and some
Of the babies died, and my sister was very sick,
Maybe from drinking the dirty water.
2. HOW HER MOTHER AND SISTER DIED
Sometimes, my mother says, her home
West of Lvov comes back to her in dreams
That open in grayness with the sounds
Of a young, flowered girl in white
Singing a prayer of first communion,
The dirt streets around the church pure
With priests and girls and boys.
The singing prayer leads her to the grave
Where her mother and her sister Genja
And her sister's baby daughter lie,
The marshy grave where the hungry men
Dropped them after shooting them
And cutting them in secret places.
My mother says, these men from the east
Were like buffaloes: terrible and big.
She waves the dreams away with her hand
And starts again, talking of plowing the fields
Of cutting winter wood, of that time
When the double-bladed axe slipped
And sank a wound so deep in her foot
That she felt her heart would not
Jar loose from its frozen pause.
3. THE BEETS
She tells me of the beets she dug up
In Germany. They were endless, redder
Than roses gone bad in an early frost,
Redder than a grown man's kidney or heart.
The first beet she remembers,
She was alone in the field, alone
Without her father or mother near,
No sister even. They were all dead,
Left behind in Lvov. The ground was wet
And cold, but not soft, never soft.
She ate the raw beet, even though
She knew they would beat her.
She says, sometimes she pretended
She was deaf, stupid, crippled,
Or diseased with Typhus or cholera,
Even with what the children called
The French disease, anything to avoid
The slap, the whip across her back
The leather fist in her face above her eye.
If she could've given them her breasts
To suck, her womb to penetrate
She would have, just so they will not
Hurt her the way they hurt her sister
And her mother and the baby.
She wonders what was her reward
For living in such a world? It was not love
Or money. She can't even remember
What happened to the deutsche marks
The American sergeant left that day
In the spring when the war ended.
She wonders if God will remember
Her labors. She wonders if there is a God.
4. 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 Stroke
While her left hand
clutches the sheet,
pulling it tighter
across her chest,
her gurgling breath
reaches deep inside me
like a spoon
stirring and stirring.
This is all
that’s left of her:
this breathing
and this hand,
the one stirring
and the other holding tight,
clutching the sheet
like a boat
on the ocean
that is her dying.
How do I ask her
if she wants to die?
My Mother’s House, Outside of Lvov, 1942
The soldier stood in the doorway
facing the room with its mud floor,
its wooden table, its rough cut chairs,
and my grandmother asleep in her bed.
Behind him the snow was falling.
The snow on the ground was old.
It was brown and caked and hid
the things the dying leave behind:
dirt and blood and their own shit.
The soldier wanted many things:
a wife, warmth, safety, food,
and a God who would take pity
on him and send His Son to do
the thing the soldier thought he couldn’t.
Cattle Train to Magdeburg
My mother still remembers
The long train to Magdeburg
the box cars
bleached gray
by Baltic winters
The rivers and the cities
she had never seen before
and would never see again:
the sacred Vistula
the smoke haunted ruins of Warsaw
the Warta, where horse flesh
met steel and fell
The leather fists
of pale boys
boys her own age
perhaps seventeen
perhaps nineteen
but different
convinced of their godhood
by the cross they wore
different from the one
she knew in Lvov
The long twilight journey
to Magdeburg--
four days that became six years
six years that became sixty
And always a train of box cars
bleached to Baltic gray.
My Mother Reads My Poem “Cattle Train to Magdeburg”
She looks at me and says,
“That’s not how it was.
I couldn’t see anything
except when they stopped
the boxcars and opened the doors
And I didn’t see
any of those rivers,
and if I did, I didn’t know
their names. No one said,
‘Look, look this river
is the Warta, and there
that’s the Vistula.’
What I remember
is the bodies being
pushed out—sometimes
women would kick them out
with their feet.
Now it sounds terrible.
You think we were bad women
but we weren’t. We were girls
taken from homes, alone.
Some had seen terrible things
done to their families.
Even though you’re a grown man
and a teacher, we saw things
I don’t want to tell you about.”
What the Tower of Babel Looks Like
It looks like
the stones in your hands,
the ones in your eyes,
the ones beside you
when you sit on the ground
It looks like the weather,
when the weather
is hard and the clouds
press down ‘til you think
you’ll never breathe
again
Babel is the sorrow
mothers feel
when their daughters
won’t call them,
and the years unroll
and they still don’t call
Babel looks like
Saturday night
in a small town
on the prairie
in Illinois
after the farmers
leave for better
places
It looks like
everything you never
want to see
and someday
will.
Dr. John Z. Guzlowski
Professor Emeritus
Eastern Illinois University
Hear Garrison Keillor read my poem
"What My Father Believed"
http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/programs/2007/12/24/#friday
My Blog About My Parents and Their
Experiences in Nazi Germany
http://lightning-and-ashes.blogspot.com |
