Retreat

This week’s other featured books, “Pretty Tripwire,” by Alessandra Lynch and “Don’t Say a Word,” by Elizabeth Roper Marcus, can be found by scrolling down below this post, along with the First tuesday Replay. Or, just click the author’s name on our Authors page.

——————————–

THE BOOK: Retreat – A Love Story

PUBLISHED IN: April 2021

THE AUTHOR: John Guzlowski

THE PUBLISHER: Kasva Press

SUMMARY: Magda was a pretty young war widow on her lunch break. Hans was a soldier on furlough, a Bavarian farm boy Magda found wandering lost in Berlin. After two weeks together, she sent him on his way—back to the nightmare of the Eastern Front.

Nine months later, Magda is trying to survive as her city is bombed to rubble, while Hans is somewhere in the Ukraine, slogging through snow and mud to find his way back to her, struggling to maintain his humanity despite the horrors he has survived and the brutality he has witnessed—and perpetrated.

Retreat is a story of the terrible costs of war, of love amid crushing defeat, of complicity—and redemption.

THE BACK STORY: When I retired from teaching in 2005, I put aside the sorts of academic writing I had been focused on up to that time, and I started devoting myself to the writing I really wanted to do: writing about my mom and dad and their experiences in World War II.

My parents were Polish Catholic farm kids who were gathered up by the Germans and sent to Germany with millions of other Poles, Russians, Greeks, French people, and Jews to work as slave laborers in Germany. My dad spent almost five years in Buchenwald concentration camp, and my mom spent two and a half years in various camps. My dad used to say that his time in the camps was hard, but my mother’s time was harder. He never explained to me what he meant by that. It was not until after my dad died when I was fifty years old that my mom felt I was old enough and mature enough to hear about her experiences in the war. I found out that she was nineteen when the Germans came to her house in the woods west of Lvov and raped and killed her mother and her sister, kicked her sister’s baby to death, and raped my mother.

For years before I retired, I had been writing poems about my parents’ experience during the war. Those poems grew into my book of poems and memoir pieces, Echoes of Tattered Tongues.

One of the poems that didn’t get into that book was a sonnet called “Early Fall”. It’s about the German soldiers who raped my mother and killed my grandmother and my aunt and her baby. I had written poems about what happened after that day, but up to that point I hadn’t written about that day. The sonnet describes the soldiers just before they enter my grandmother’s house to rape and kill those inside. “Early Fall” ends with one of the soldiers pushing the door open with the barrel of his rifle and taking the first step into the house.

Writing the sonnet started me thinking — I tried to visualize what actually happened in my mother’s house in the woods that day. Of course, I had heard about what happened from my mother, but I had never tried to imagine that moment when the Germans came, and the sequence of events that followed.

As I kept imagining and thinking about that moment, I started writing and kept writing until I had written five pages; and the next day I wrote some more, and then more and then more. And that became this novel, Retreat: A love story.

But here’s the odd thing about this writing. When the German soldier pushes open the door, he doesn’t enter the house where my mother and her mother lived. It’s a different house, and the woman he meets is a different woman, and what happens is different from what happened.

Let me explain.

My father never forgave the Germans for what they did. My dad had seen his friends in Buchenwald crucified and hanged, castrated and frozen to death. He had seen women raped and beaten and shot, their breasts torn apart by bayonets, their babies thrown and scattered in the air like sand. When I was growing up, my dad would not let me play with a boy he suspected of being German. My mother was much the same. She could not forgive the men who did what they did to her family.

I remember asking my mom once toward the end of her life if she forgave the Germans. She thought for a while. I’m sure she was thinking about her mother and her sister and her sister’s baby and how she herself finally escaped from the Germans, at least for a while, by jumping through a broken window and making her way to the forest.

What my mother finally said surprised me. I thought she was going to say what I had heard my father say over and over, that all Germans were evil. But that’s not what she said. She told me a story about when she was first brought to Germany. She was taken to a slave labor camp where they worked the women just like they were men, making the women work sixteen, eighteen, twenty-hour shifts, six days a week. She said that she knew she couldn’t survive that for long, maybe a week, maybe two.

She was saved by a German, a guard in a concentration camp.

He took pity on her. Who knows what his motives were? My mother spoke a little German she’d learned in her home village. Maybe this was what got her saved. Maybe not.

Whatever it was that motivated this guard, he succeeded in getting her transferred to a different work area where the work was not killing work. She survived the war.

After telling me this story, she looked at me for a while in silence, and then she said, “Some Germans were bad people. Some good. I forgive the good ones.”

My story of Hans and Magda is a story, I believe, of two Germans who my mother would have forgiven.

WHY THIS TITLE: I struggled with the title of this novel. Titles usually aren’t a problem for me. In fact, I’ve always thought of myself as better at writing title than just about anything else. But the title for this novel wasn’t easy. My first choice was “Shit War.” That’s a phrase that Hans uses in the novel to describe the war. I thought, however, that putting the word “shit” into the title would be a problem for some people. I’ve also used the titles “The German,” “The Soldier and the Widow,” “Hans and Magda,” “This Rough Magic,” and “Road of Bones.”

Finally, I gave up on deciding on a title and asked my publisher to come up with something. He did. Retreat: a love story.

WHY SOMEONE WOULD WANT TO READ IT: I think it’s important to hear stories about terrible things. It connects us to the past and also prepares us for the future. But what is as important as hearing the stories of terrible things is hearing the stories of hope and struggle and survival. I think hearing these stories makes us more human, more humane, and stronger.

REVIEW COMMENTS:

“Guzlowski has created a bold, important work that contains both the love of a son and the critical eye of a chronicler. It is a story about the power of the individual as well as the larger narrative of the human spirit. A simply terrific book.” — Jason Mott, the NY Times best-selling author of The Returned and The Wonder of All Things

Retreat: A Love Story is a unique story of love and war. It’s all in the telling, and poet John Guzlowski masters the fresh and exact. There is not a single unearned word in this novel. A triumph of savagery and strength! —Janice Daugharty, the author of Like a Sister reviewer: “Guzlowski has created a bold, important work that contains both the love of a son and the critical eye of a chronicler. It is a story about the power of the individual as well as the larger narrative of the human spirit. A simply terrific book.” –

In lucid prose and with an engaging sense of place, Guzlowski gives us an intimate yet historically valenced view of the Second World War. The events covered in Retreat alternate between Berlin and a location just east of Kiev between January 17 and January 21, 1944. Civilians and soldiers, victims and perpetrators—all of Guzlowski’s finely drawn characters—receive full human treatment. The result is a taut and suspenseful narrative filled with characters who will stay with readers for a long time to come. Put this one on the shelf beside Jean-Paul Sartre’s Troubled Sleep and John Steinbeck’s The Moon Is Down; most novelists would be reduced to dust by such a comparison, but Guzlowski makes good company with these earlier masters. —Okla Elliott, author of The Cartographer’s Ink and From the Crooked Timber

AUTHOR PROFILE: Born in a refugee camp in Germany after World War II, John Guzlowski came to America with his family as a Displaced Person in 1951. His parents had been Polish slave laborers in Nazi Germany during the war. Growing up in the tough immigrant neighborhoods around Humboldt Park in Chicago, he met hardware-store clerks with Auschwitz tattoos on their arms, Polish cavalry officers who still mourned their dead horses, and women who had walked from Siberia to Iran to escape the Russians. In his work, Guzlowski remembers and honors the experiences and ultimate strength of these voiceless survivors.

An acclaimed poet, Guzlowski is also a respected teacher, literary critic, and author of both fiction and nonfiction. His recent poetry collection Echoes of Tattered Tongues won the 2017 Montaigne Medal of the Eric Hoffer Awards as the most thought-provoking book of the year. He is the author of the well-received Hank & Marvin series of detective novels, including Suitcase Charlie, Little Altar Boy, and Murdertown (fall 2021), all published by Kasva Press. He is also a columnist for Chicago’s Dziennik Związkowy, the oldest Polish daily newspaper in America.

Guzlowski received his BA in English Literature from the University of Illinois, Chicago, and his MA and PhD in English from Purdue University. He is a Professor Emeritus of English Literature at Eastern Illinois University, and currently lives in Lynchburg, Virginia.

AUTHOR COMMENTS: It’s easy to turn away from history, to say that was so long ago, to say that it doesn’t matter to anybody. But I think doing so cuts us off not only from the people who brought us to this stage in history, but it also cuts us off from the lessons history wants to teach us about how to survive and how to love and how to hope. History is our mother — teaching us all the lessons we need to know to go on.

SAMPLE CHAPTER:

The second chapter of the novel — focusing on Hans — appears at my blog: https://lightning-and-ashes.blogspot.com/2010/03/german-short-story-about-war.html

LOCAL OUTLETS: The book is available through most independent bookstores and Barnes and Noble.

WHERE ELSE TO BUY IT: It’s available as a paperback book and as a Kindle from Amazon.

PRICE: $14.95 in paperback. $4.95 in Kindle. CONTACT THE AUTHOR: jzguzlowski@gmail.com

My Amazon writer’s page is: https://www.amazon.com/~/e/B00287TCBG My Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/john.guzlowski/

My Twitter page: @johnguzlowski