ISBN

978-1-77403-353-1

Also can be ordered on ​this website

REVIEW by DEBBIE OKUN HILL
Child of War
A Graphic Poetry Book
by Gregory Sass
Silver Bow Publishing, 2025, 114 pp.
ISBN: 978-177403-353-1 (print) (softcover)
ISBN: 978-177403-354-8 (e-book) (Kindle)

“I know why those/who’ve been through this hell/rarely want to talk about it.” (excerpt pg. 46)

War rips our inner being. It is not a pretty topic. Yet Canadian poet Gregory Sass refuses to bury his childhood memories beneath an exploding bomb. He’s seen hell at such a young age and now in his retirement he is ready to unveil the horrors he witnessed and endured as a child.

His latest 114-page poetry collection Child of War (Silver Bow Publishing 2025) is not an easy read and for some it could trigger some deeply rooted emotions. However, it is a poetic and graphic journey that unfortunately needs to be shared in the hopes that history will never repeat itself.

It begins with the introduction of the new Germany under the leadership of Hitler and then continues with Sass’s own background: how his father left, how his mother coped with raising two young boys on her own, how Sass witnessed and experienced the trauma of war and post-war on a regular basis.
Blood and the stench of death permeate his writing.

In his poem, “Thoughts of an eighteen-year-old soldier”, he writes “The snow is stained red with blood/but your face is colourless” (pg. 25). In the poem “The sinking of the Gustloff” he reveals “On the ground lay snow-covered, bundled,/dead bodies stacked like cordwood.” (pg. 32)
He covers topics such as rape, concentration camps, starvation, prostitution, lying, stealing, scabies, lice, TB…even suicide, so many suicides, and so much death. “You hear the explosions,//you see the rubble,/you always know you may be next –” (pg. 56)
So many times, I had to put the book down, but in Sass’s life, this was his reality and there was no escaping. For that reason, his poetic memoir reminds me of entries in a diary. Most of his poems are short, and fit on one page, although there are a few that exceed two or three pages in length.

The book also reminds me of an exercise in art therapy. Like the quick ink sketches that Indian-Canadian poet Rupi Kaur uses in her best-selling poetry books, Sass includes over 100 of his stark black and white images to illustrate and accentuate the crude realities of war. This includes images of dead bodies, dreary gaunt faces, barbed wire fences, and bombed-out buildings.
At times, I wondered if the poet would ever move beyond the topic of death. I, too, wanted to escape but Sass did an excellent job of holding my attention as I empathized with the young children who were trapped, exposed to both illness and brutality.

“I am six and a half and have diphtheria.” (p. 58) “My mother periodically scrapes pus/off my tongue with a spoon/so that I don’t choke.” (pg. 58)
After a while, the poems started to all sound the same, yet I continued to be swept into Sass’s ongoing nightmare to marvel at the resilience and to discover how it would end. Would tightening the manuscript still create awareness of the horrors of war without sharing all his experiences? Or was that the point? Proving once again that war is endless? If so, this could not be a happy book.

And yet, Sass does infuse some humour to provide the reader with some relief like in the poem “As the sun shines”, when a young Sass is caught urinating from the roof of an apartment building.

As for his writing style, Sass also breaks tradition. I don’t recall him ever rhyming (not that readers expect rhyming poetry anymore), but he also shies away from using too may poetic devices. Instead, he often uses the five senses (smell, sight, sound, taste and touch) to enhance his storytelling in accessible easy-to-read prose poems, sometimes chopping up his sentences in various lines to tell his story, sometimes writing words in paragraph form.
I especially enjoyed when he uses unique similes to describe his relatives. Two of my favourite poems were “My grandmother” where Sass writes “My grandmother/was a comet/that streaked/across the night sky/of my young life” (pg. 78) followed by the poem “Books”, where he writes “My mother is like a dry sponge.” (pg. 79)

I also enjoyed the poem “The cat” where he pens “I am a black panther./I prowl during the day/and hunt at night. My prey are the slats of fences,” (pg. 74)

Similar to his 2024 poetry collection Soul’s Journey, the strength of this recent book Child of War also stems from Sass’s heart-wrenching and honest reflections.

“Inside me, all that has happened/continues to clang and jangle/even as my entry into academic high school/demands submission and conformity.” (p. 110)

Bravo for this brave releasing of the emotional chains of war! Sass’s words will clang, jangle and haunt me for a long time.

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​REVIEW by JOHN B. LEE  Poet Laureate of the city of Brantford, Norfolk County, Canada Cuba Literary Alliance.

“I call heaven and earth to witness you today: I have put before you life and death, blessing and curse — therefore choose life!”.~ Deuteronomy 30, 16

Every once in a while, I have the privilege of reading a book which I might well describe as essential. A book so profound, so real, so true, so authentic, so deeply moving, so morally good as to render its presence in my private library and in my edified imagination as though it had always been there, simply waiting for the reader to reify the text as received, an affirmation of our common humanity, thereby establishing a deep connection, a bond between myself and the author.

And Child of War by Gregory Sass is just such a book – a book not born in the library, but born into the world, from a world which does not love us well, a world where the death cult of Nazism has taken hold on life, where the master race might be heard saying “We love death more than you love life.” And Gregory Sass, born in Berlin in 1938 gives us the story of a child who survives the worst years in an awful place, only to suffer the aftermath as a child of post-war depravation and suffering to emerge from that devastation, to look back and write about what it meant to be a child of war, as he says in an epigram quoting Eglantyne Jebb, “Every war is a war against children.”

As he writes in the opening poem “To Annabelle Bann”: “Ask the big questions and arm wrestle with God.” This phrase echoes the title of Jordan Peterson’s recent book We Who Wrestle with God, which is something of an exegesis inspired by the story of Jacob in the Bible. And the suffering of the child within the man, the private experience of Gregory Sass from his birth through his formative years, is a dark reminder of dark times. It is a bleak recollection of grim experience, emerging into the light, a light he carries with him, a light which illuminates the interior world of a child in darkness, a light which radiates into that outer darkness revealing the evil that lurks in the shadows, an evil which is, in the words of the poet Milton “darkness visible.” And although this is a difficult read, it is important that we be reminded by these poems, and by the drawings which sully the pages with images that horrify, edify, affirm that we must linger long enough to apprehend that which is so difficult to comprehend. That is our capacity for evil, as manifest in times of war, and thereby be reminded of our individual and collective capacity for good. To emerge triumphant, in the words of scripture to “choose life.”

If evil may be said to be that which makes the worst from the best, then what good might be said to be that which makes the best from the worst. And Child of War however bleak, however horrifying, however terrible is an example of a book which defeats the very evil which it embraces. One might well beware, as Nietzsche warns us “He who fights with monsters should see to it that he himself does not become a monster. And if you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss gazes into you.”

In his poem “The Great Flight,” the author reminds us:

       You are not alone
       whenever you walk
       this ground, soaked
       with the blood, sweat and tears
       of those who were here before.
       Honour them by knowing them
       and letting them touch your soul

And this is a book of then and now, a book of us and them. It reminds those of us privileged to have come of age in a stable nation at a time of peace, as in the words of Douglas Murray from his book On Democracies and Death Cults: Israel and the Future of Civilization, “Some people never get a chance to be weighed in the balance.” And so one may well ask “who would I have been, and what would I have done, if I had lived in such a time and in such a place?” Sass was born into a world where the temporary aberration of bad governance given over to the admiration of the monster who gave the world ‘the final solution,” the death of nearly sixty million people mostly civilians, a man whose portrait appears in blotches of ink opposite the poem “The New Germany,” a man who extoled with great admiration the quintessential Nazis praising him as “the man with an iron heart.” The closing line of that horrific poem “Democracy is destroyed in 53 days.” And is it not prophetic of our times, though it refers to the year 1933? As we move through poems inspired by “Kristallnacht,” “Stalingrad,” ‘The final solution,’’ “Auschwitz,” “The Sinking of the Gustloff,” “Retribution,” “The Great Flight,” into a time of scabies, lice, hunger, diphtheria, homelessness, “Hiroshima,” tuberculosis, and from there into a time of reconstruction posing the question “How did we—each of us alone – keep going/ when there was little to support us?” Good question, well answered. In the poem addressed to his mother near the end of the book he chooses to say “thank you/for giving me life/for loving me … for teaching me to read/ and to love books/ thank you/ for the Sunday mornings/ when you made/ sharing an egg and a bun/ into a feast.”

In the end, in the final analysis, in the face of horror and suffering – gratitude – for the gift of life is an affirmation, despite that which breaks some of us, makes us feel we are victims, as he writes in his poem “There are reasons:” “I was born too late/ to do harm, cannot escape/where I come from/ and what was done by my people./ My soul was poisoned,/ but I always look at myself/ and atone with care./ I am not Sisyphus.”

In his book Man’s Search for Meaning,” Victor Frankl makes the poignant observation concerning the prisoners in concentration camps “those who shared their bread were more likely to survive than those who stole bread from others.” So, what might we learn from Sass’s masterpiece? In his author’s profile he opines “Current events often remind him of his own experiences as a child of war.”

Many years after the Cuban Missile Crisis I took advantage of the opportunity to inquire of my Cuban friend and contemporary Manuel Leon, “What was it like for you in Cuba in October 1961?” He was almost exactly my own age, and being a farm boy like me, he spoke of working in the fields while the American planes flew overhead, with his mother calming him and reassuring him that everything would be alright in the end. Unlike me, he did not have access to the news, nor was he subjected to the fear mongering by the chattering classes, warning of nearly inevitable consequence of mutually assured destruction.

And so it goes. And so it was. And so it went. And so it seems it will ever be for children of war. In my mind warfare is always a failure of the human imagination. The book Child of War reminds us that evil is within us, as Gregory Sass writes in his poem “Marked,” “It is endlessly here: the secret of evil …”. Reading this book is both an antidote and an anodyne. For those of us who have never suffered the realities of war at home, when we weigh our hearts in balance with the heavy hearted, though our hearts be light, still we too may embrace love and shout “choose life!”

Child of War is available to order at your local bookstore or library through Ingram Distribution or directly from the publisher Silver Bow Publishing.

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