LIGHTNING AND ASHES by John Guzlowski (2007, 86 pages, poetry)

This is a book of poems about the Holocaust.

This book was written by John Guzlowski, both of whose parents were Polish Catholic survivors of Nazi concentration camps.

I cried while reading this book.

*

Here is one of the poems. It is called “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.

*

Here is another. It is called “What My Father Believed”.

                        He didn’t know about the Rock of Ages

                        or bringing in the sheaves or Jacob’s ladder

                        or gathering at the beautiful river

                        that flows beneath the throne of God.

                        He’d never heard of the Baltimore Catechism

                        either, and didn’t know the purpose of life

                        was to love and honor and serve God.

                        He’d been to the village church as a boy

                        in Poland, and knew he was Catholic

                        because his mother and father were buried

                        in a cemetery under wooden crosses.

                        His sister Catherine was buried there too.

                        The day their mother died Catherine took

                        to the kitchen corner where the stove sat,

                        and cried. She wouldn’t eat or drink, just cried

                        until she died there, died of a broken heart.

                        She was three or four years old, he was five.

                        What he knew about the nature of God

                        and religion came from the sermons

                        the priests told at mass, and this got mixed up

                        with his own life. He knew living was hard,

                        and that even children are meant to suffer.

                        Sometimes, when he was drinking he’d ask,

                        “Didn’t God send his own son here to suffer?”

                        My father believed we are here to lift logs

                        that can’t be lifted, to hammer steel nails

                        so bent they crack when we hit them.

                        In the slave labor camps in Germany,

                        He’d seen men try the impossible and fail.

                        He believed life is hard, and we should

                        help each other. If you see someone

                        on a cross, his weight pulling him down

                        and breaking his muscles, you should try

                        to lift him, even if only for a minute,

                        even though you know lifting won’t save him.