by John Guzlowski
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| Today an anti-Semitic hate crime shot and killed my friend Lori Gilbert Kaye z”l while she was praying in synagogue. Lori you were a jewel of our community a true Eshet Chayil, a Woman of Valor. You were always running to do a mitzvah (good deed) and generously gave tzedaka (charity) to everyone. Your final good deed was jumping in front of Rabbi Mendel Goldstein to take the bullet and save his life. —Audrey Jacobs, Jewish Journal, April 27, 2019 |
They killed us on the banks of the Danube
and in the ovens of Auschwitz.
They killed us in our homes
and they killed us in the woods.
They killed us in the heat of summer
and the coldest cold of winter.
They killed us pleading to God
and they killed us
as we lay in the mud.
They killed us when we were children
and they killed us when we were old
and too exhausted to weep.
They killed us
and they continue to kill us.
In America and everywhere.
John Guzlowski's writing appears in Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac, Rattle, Ontario Review, North American Review, and other journals. His poems and personal essays about his Polish parents’ experiences as slave laborers in Nazi Germany and refugees in Chicago appear in his memoir Echoes of Tattered Tongues. Echoes received the 2017 Benjamin Franklin Poetry Award and the Eric Hoffer Foundation's Montaigne Award for most thought-provoking book of the year. He is also the author of two Hank Purcell mysteries and the war novel Road of Bones.