john guzlowski
- Location
- Danville, Virginia, USA
- Birthday
- June 22
- Bio
- I was born in a refugee camp in Germany after World War II, and came with my Polish Catholic parents Jan and Tekla and my sister Donna to the United States as Displaced Persons in 1951. My 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. I write about these people.
MY RECENT POSTS
- Stacy Szymaszek
May 23, 2012 11:19AM - Give Peace a Chance--It's
cheaper
May 20, 2012 01:00PM - Call for Translators
May 08, 2012 08:43AM - Time Between Trains by Anthony
Bukoski
April 19, 2012 03:31PM - Holocaust Remembrance Day 2012
April 18, 2012 11:07AM
MY RECENT COMMENTS
- “Nobody wants to take
responsibility for the war but
finally
it's my war and
yours…”
May 20, 2012 03:32PM - “Thanks for telling me
about visiting buchenwald. My
dad was
there, a prisoner.
Ye…”
April 18, 2012 04:38PM - “good daughter, martha's
book blue positive it
terrific--lots
of poems about
pregn…”
March 17, 2012 01:45AM - “Thanks, John. You sound
like you have a good
soul.”
March 10, 2012 05:18PM - “Daisy, yes, it's Walden
Pond on a hot early
September
Saturday.”
February 12, 2012 10:33PM
John guzlowski's Links
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/…
My father was probably the hardest working man I knew.
When I was a kid he would work double shifts, 16 hour days, and some years he wouldn't take vacations because the bosses at the factory where he worked would pay him double time. They would give him his/…
Sad news over night.
Nicholas Hughes, the son of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, committed
suicide.
The poet Edward Byrne wrote an article about it at his blog
One Poet's
Notes.
The BBC report is also worth reading.
And all I can think of is one of Plath's baby poems:… Read full post »
John Updike died earlier today.
I was reading Updike's Bech: A Book when I heard, and in it, Updike is funny and smart, and loving.
He loved books and writing so much, and he loved showing everyone how much he loved books and writing. You can see it on every page.… Read full post »
A while ago, I gave a talk to a high school class about my parents and their experiences under the Nazis. I talked about my father’s four years in Buchenwald and my mothers two and half years in various slave labor camps in Germany.
During the Q… Read full post »
When my father was dying of liver cancer, the doctors popped him full of morphine, enough morphine -- they thought -- to keep him drifting peacefully toward his death, but the morphine wasn't enough. Nothing was enough to make him forget what it was like in the concentration camp… Read full post »
I wrote the following to thank all my generations and generations of ancestors who simply kept going despite all the misery they faced.
My people were all poor people, the ones who survived to look in my eyes and touch my fingers and those who didn’t, dying instead of fever,… Read full post »
I. The Siege of Khe Sanh
The Vietnam War wasn’t much in my life that year.
Marching in the anti-war demonstrations in Chicago that spring, I wore a Vietcong cooley hat I made out of construction paper, but I wasn’t really thinking about the war.&n… Read full post »
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