Op/Ed: 70 years ago, a neverending war began

When you read about history in the history books, it all seems so clear. The numbers make it seem that way. Numbers, people say, don’t lie. A thing begins on a certain date, and it ends on another particular date. It all seems neat and clean, but it isn’t really.

The history books tell us that World War II began 70 years ago on Sept. 1, 1939, when the Nazis invaded Poland from the west, and the same books tell us that the fighting in Europe ended on V-E day, May 8, 1945.

My father, Jan Guzlowski, was not a student of history. He never had any kind of formal education, never went to school, but he knew history.

He had lived through history.

He was a teenager on a farm in Poland when the Nazis invaded and turned his whole world upside down.

I guess you can say he learned history from the ground up. He was captured by the Nazis in a roundup in 1940 and sent to Germany.

He spent the next five years at hard labor in concentration and slave labor camps there.

But for him, the war didn’t end when his camp was liberated sometime at the end of March 1945; it didn’t end on Victory-in-Europe Day, May 8, 1945; and it didn’t end when my family finally came to the United States as refugees, “Displaced Persons,” in 1951.

The war was always with him and with my mother, Tekla, a woman who spent two years in the camps and had seen the other women in her family raped and murdered.

My parents carried with them the pain of war and its nightmares every day of their lives.

In 1997, 42 years after the war ended, when my father was dying in a hospice, there were times when he was sure that the doctors and the nurses there were the Nazi guards who beat him when he was a prisoner in the concentration camp.

There were also times when he couldn’t recognize me and my mother and sister. He looked at us and was frightened. He thought we were there to torture him.

In 2005, toward the end of my mother’s life, I told her that I was going to be giving a poetry reading and that I would be reading poems about her and my father and their experiences in the war.

I asked if there was something she wanted me to say to the audience.

“Yes,” she said, “Tell them we weren’t the only ones.”

My parents knew that the war had always been with them, teaching them the hard lessons, teaching them how to suffer, how to be patient, how to live without hope or bread, how to survive what would kill a person in the normal course of life.

The war taught them that war has no beginning and no end.

Guzlowski, an emeritus professor at Eastern Illinois University, is a resident of Danville. He wrote this commentary for The News & Advance.

Online Features
Hear Garrison Keillor read John Guzlowski’s poem, "What My Father Believed":

Read the author’s blog about his parents and their experiences in Nazi Germany:
lightning-and-ashes.blogspot.com