My Voice

Poets from the Polish Diaspora

 

There is no room in real poetry for delicate metaphors when you come from people who survived the camps.

My parents were Polish slave laborers in Nazi Germany. When they came to America.  They didn’t bring polished silver or family heirlooms.  They brought nightmares, scars, and the heavy, silent weight of everything they’d lost. Growing up in the immigrant neighborhoods of Chicago, I learned early on that history isn’t something neat in a textbook. It’s the way your father looks at a slice of bread. It’s the silence in a room when someone mentions the war.

That is why Polish diaspora poets—especially the children and grandchildren of immigrants—have to keep writing.

It’s easy for the world to forget. History gets smoothed over, sanitized, or buried under the noise of modern life. People want comfortable stories. They want poetry that sounds like pressed flowers. But the diaspora experience isn’t about pressed flowers; it’s about blood, mud, muscle, and memory. If we don’t write down what happened to our parents, our grandparents, and ourselves, no one else will. The world will just move on, and those lives—those hard, broken, resilient lives—will be erased as if they never existed.

To write as a Polish writer in America is to act as a witness. You are standing with one foot in the slaughterhouses and steel mills of the New World, and the other foot in the ruined fields and displaced persons camps of the Old. You carry the voices of people who were illiterate, people who were silenced, people who were worked to the bone and died without ever getting to tell their side of the story.

When you write, you give those people back their names. You give them back their voices.

It doesn’t matter if you write in Polish or in plain, blunt English. What matters is the honesty. Don’t try to make it pretty. Write about the lard spread on rye bread, the freezing winter wind off Lake Michigan, the smell of cabbage boiling in a basement flat, and the stubborn, unyielding will to survive. Write about the quiet grief of living between two worlds and belonging fully to neither.

So to my fellow diaspora writers: pick up the pen and hit the paper like you’re driving a nail. Don’t wait for permission, and don’t worry about being literary. Just tell the truth about what was remembered, what was suffered, and what was saved. As long as we keep putting it on the page, the dead are not forgotten, and the story isn’t over.

 

Guest Editor

John Guzlowski