December 11, 2025 5:00 am
Cattle Train to Magdeburg
My mother still remembers
The long train to Magdeburg
the box cars
bleached gray
by Baltic winters
The rivers and the cities
she had never seen before
and would never see again:
the sacred Vistula
the smoke haunted ruins of Warsaw
the Warta, where horse flesh
met steel and fell
The leather fists
of pale boys
boys her own age
perhaps seventeen
perhaps nineteen
but different
convinced of their godhood
by the cross they wore
different from the one
she knew in Lvov
The long twilight journey
to Magdeburg—
four days that became six years
six years that became sixty
And always a train of box cars
bleached to Baltic gray.
~~
How Her Mother and Sister Died
Sometimes, my mother says, her home
West of Lvov comes back to her in dreams
That open in grayness with the sounds
Of a young, flowered girl in white
Singing a prayer of first communion,
The dirt streets around the church pure
With priests and girls and boys.
The singing prayer leads her to the grave
Where her mother and her sister Genja
And her sister’s baby daughter lie,
The marshy graves where the hungry men
Dropped them after shooting them
And cutting them in secret places.
My mother says, these men from the east
Were like buffaloes: terrible and big.
She waves the dreams away with her hand
And starts again, talking of plowing the fields
Of cutting winter wood, of that time
When the double bladed axe slipped
And sank a wound so deep in her foot
That she felt her heart would not
Jar loose from its frozen pause.
~~~~~
Copyright 2025 John Guzlowski
John Guzlowski’s poems about his parents’ experiences as slave laborers in Nazi Germany appear in his award-winning Echoes of Tattered Tongues. His most recent books of poems are Mad Monk Ikkyu, True Confessions, and Small Talk: Writing about God and Writing and Me. His novels include Retreat: A Love Story and the Hank and Marvin mysteries.
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Posted by Vox Populi
Categories: Health and Nutrition, Poetry, Social Justice, War and Peace
Tags: antisemitism, Cattle Train to Magdeburg, Concentration camps, death camps, farm work, Fascism, genocide, How Her Mother and Sister Died, Jewish history, John Guzlowski, mothers and sons, Nazi, Poland, WWII
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The subject of these poems about his mother is difficult and compelling, and the precision searing. That pause!
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By Marty Williams on December 11, 2025 at 12:27 pm
Yes.
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By Vox Populi on December 11, 2025 at 12:39 pm
thanks, Marty. I miss talking to you.
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By jzguzlowski on December 11, 2025 at 8:58 pm
I miss hanging out with you, too, John, talking about poetry over coffee.
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By Marty Williams on December 16, 2025 at 6:52 pm
These two poems touch my life in many ways. Just a few thoughts:
how mothers handle grief and devastation… my mother hid her horrors till the wall she had built shattered.
Those young boys convinced of their godhood by the different crosses they wore…the crooked cross swastikas. The crooked cross now of christian nationalism.
My soul friend Etty Hillesum threw a letter through a slat as her trip on the cattle car from Westerbork Transit Camp in the Netherlands to Auschwitz began. Her final known words: We left the camp singing. I’m haunted by the cattle car chronicles we will never know. So much evil to stand against, it is sometimes overwhelming, and I just want to turn away to pour a cup of serenity. The Guzlowski poems rebuild love and hope. But they also remind us of what history has produced, and is producing.
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By jmnewsome93c0e5f9cd on December 11, 2025 at 12:13 pm
What a beautiful post, Jim. Thank you.
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By Vox Populi on December 11, 2025 at 12:40 pm
Aye Jim: You’ve really said it. What a mess we find ourselves in, this point in our lives, and I once believed human culture, post Viet Nam would be progressing toward some kind of common realization of peace. It’s gone quite the other way, presently Pell Mell!
Here’s wishing you, all of us some vestige of solace. “Let all mortal flesh keep…”
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By Sean Sexton on December 11, 2025 at 1:01 pm
thank you. When my mother found out I was writing poems about her experiences, she said I should tell people that she was not the only one who suffered, not the only one in the camps. I try to do that with every word I write about my mom and dad.
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By jzguzlowski on December 11, 2025 at 9:01 pm
Thank you so much for keeping your mother’s memory alive, and reminding us of what she and others faced. Peace to you tonight.
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By jmnewsome93c0e5f9cd on December 11, 2025 at 9:10 pm
You’ve done that task admirably.
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By Vox Populi on December 12, 2025 at 2:20 am
Haunting poems. “And always a train of box cars / bleached to Baltic gray.” And somehow I can’t help but feeling they are for today.
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By boehmrosemary on December 11, 2025 at 10:23 am
The parallels to today are frightening.
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By Vox Populi on December 11, 2025 at 10:26 am
So well done.
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By Bruce Morton on December 11, 2025 at 9:38 am
Aren’t they, though?
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By Vox Populi on December 11, 2025 at 9:42 am
I second Sean — such clarity in the grief of those memories and grief…
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By Laure-Anne on December 11, 2025 at 9:10 am
What superb poetry—so clear flowing, this stream of memory and word. A vivid accounting so lovely in the telling, even its harsh terms safely pass the heart.
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By Sean Sexton on December 11, 2025 at 6:08 am
Exactly, Sean. Guz writes with such courage and precision. Even horrors are brought into the clear light.
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By Vox Populi on December 11, 2025 at 8:16 am