This poem is a tribute to my great-grandfather, Eugenius “Gene” Zdzislaw Borowski, a father, a grandfather, a great-grandfather, and a Holocaust victim.

In 1939, the Germans took Warsaw, Poland. When he was only four or five years old, Gene’s family was taken by Nazis. He remembered being herded like cattle onto cattle cars, with barely enough room to breathe. He remembers the days spent on these carts, rocking back and forth, the Polish Jewish prisoners standing in their in own excrement, blood, vomit, and worse.

The family was brought with thousands of others to Dachau, a concentration camp for Polish Jews. As they were unloaded, they were put into two lines. Fearing the worst, Hattie asked a soldier where each line led. He told her- one goes to the work camp, the other, the “showers.” As clever as she was, Hattie knew that was no shower she wanted to be taking. Fortunately, Polish ladies are clever. Most of them would keep coins sewn into the hems of their skirts, for emergencies. This certainly counted as an emergency, so Hattie pulled the coin from its stitching and bribed the soldier she talked to into putting her family into the work lines. He took it, but warned her that they would probably still be separated.

Separated, they were. Many of the weaker prisoners were taken from the work lines to be experimented on. Gene and his baby brother Michal were separated from their family. Gene was brought to a room where the doctors stuck needles into certain spots of his lower back in search of nerve endings and spinal connections. They wound up paralyzing him. As he was in rehabilitation, awaiting the attempts to see if they heal him, he saw a nurse walk by, holding a bundle of cloths the size of a basketball, dripping in blood. The man in the cot next to him, a wounded soldier, told him that the bundle of cloth held the remains of little Michal, whom they had been testing out stitches on him by cutting his throat from ear to ear to see if they could successfully stitch him up. (Spoiler alert- they could not.)

After little Gene was paralyzed, his mother found him and smuggled him out of the experimentation ward by having him hold her leg and hiding him under her dress. After they brought him back to where they were staying, Hattie had Richard (who was about nine at the time) carry Gene on his back while he worked.

This went on for quite some time, but Dachau was eventually shut down by the American soldiers. When the prisoners were set free, Gene was separated once more from his family, this time for good. He never saw them again. He did regain the usage of his legs for a good portion of his adult life, though he did finish off his life in a wheelchair. He married and became a stepfather, finally dying in 2004 at the age of 70, the events described having taken place over 65 years earlier.
Gene lived a long, full life, though he was damaged severely by his experiences. In writing this, I wished to bring to life a horror that we must never forget as a society. I also wished to tribute my lineage, knowing that without the atrocities that he endured, Gene never would have come to the United States. His suffering as well of the suffering of thousands of others did not go without its positives. Much of modern medicine exists because of the human experimentation that took place in the concentration camps, like what happened to Gene and Michal.
There is much that can be taken away from this story. First, Gene’s torturers were as human as he. The entirety of the Holocaust can be seen as one large-scale example of what humans are capable of doing to other humans. Many Nazis would return home to families of their own. Maybe they had wives, babies, toddlers, and children. They were people, and they were afraid. Many didn’t want to support Hitler, and many opposed the persecution of millions of people. Some were even Jewish, but knew by admitting it, they would, too, suffer. Nobody should be tortured like Gene, and nobody should have to torture others to survive.

All we can do is learn from the past and use it to move forward towards a brighter future.

Translation notes:
- “Gefangene” is German for “prisoner.”
- “Kaleka” is Polish for “handicapped person.”
- “Dziecko” is Polish for “baby” or “child.”