Poet John Guzlowski writes movingly here about how he came to write about a subject he didn’t even want to acknowledge thinking about: the horrific experiences his parents had as slave laborers in the death camps in Nazi Germany:
“I address students and church groups and historians and general audiences, and invariably during those presentations I read some of the things I’ve written about my parents, and when I do, I hear my parents’ voices again, the way they told me their stories, and for me that’s the value of the poems and the personal essays I’ve written about them – hearing their voices that for so long I didn’t want to hear. And finally, it’s all about those voices, my parents’ voices and the voices of all those people who didn’t survive or who did survive but couldn’t speak about what happened.”
Read the rest—including some of John’s amazing poems—here.
