A Poem for Holocaust Remembrance Day, April 11

Below, for your thoughtful reading, is a poem by John Guzlowski, a Polish-American who was born in a refugee camp in Germany after World War II and arrived with his family as a Displaced Person in 1951. He writes that his 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. “They suffered terribly,” he says, “and 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’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 … and in the Nazi death camps in Poland where so many Jews died,” Guzlowski tells us, “and still I will never be able to understand what happened to the Jews in the Holocaust.”

In 1990 John Guzlowski went to Auschwitz with his wife and daughter. They walked around taking pictures and trying to imagine what happened there, but couldn’t, because they were “just tourists,” he tells us.

The poem re-published here is from his chapbook, Language of Mules. It also appears in both editions of Holocaust, Blood to Remember, edited by Charles Fishman.

                              Tourists in Auschwitz
                              It’s a gray drizzly day
                              but still we take pictures:

                              Here we are by the mountains 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.

                               (used by permission of John Guzloski)

Irene Willis
Poetry Editor