Russia and its people have always fascinated me. The country is vast—the only country in the world larger than Canada—and its people have a complicated history. The Traitor’s Daughter by Roxane Spicer is the true story of one of those people. Spicer is a Canadian writer, journalist, and film-maker who spent more than fifty years trying to uncover her mother’s history, her secrets, and her suffering.

Agnes Spicer was born in a small village in the Ural Mountains northeast of Moscow. Agnes, her younger sister and their parents were all socialist products of Lenin and Stalin. The parents had state-sponsored jobs and along with their children, they belonged to all the appropriate Communist organizations in their community. Agnes married young (only 15 years old) to escape family strife and hopefully establish her own independence. By the late 1930s, her early marriage quickly turned out to be so abusive it almost killed her.

With World War II starting and being the patriotic young woman she was, Agnes escaped her husband and joined the Soviet military. Still a petite and pretty teenager, she was one of a large contingent of young Russian women in combat roles on the western front defending her homeland from the Germans. When she was captured in 1941, the Nazis immediately executed all the men in her unit and sent the women soldiers to Ravensbruk concentration camp. From there she was sent to Auschwitz where she acquired the tattoo that famously marked her for life.

During her incarcerations, she used a variety of aliases according to the circumstances to conceal her real identity. Her family had originally been Russian Orthodox, and for obvious reasons at that time, she did not want to be categorized as a Jew and used the Christian name she had been baptized with as a baby. In addition to her native Russian, Agnes spoke fluent German which she had learned as a girl and this skill undoubtedly aided her in surviving her years in the camps. Toward the end of the war she worked as a slave farm labourer who had been purchased by a German family.

When the allies arrived she gained her freedom but it was not all parades and roses like we see in old newsreels. The years as a concentration camp survivor and slave labourer left her broken and the survivors were vulnerable to American and British conquerors. Russia signed agreements with the Allies to repatriate all Russians who had been captured by the Germans. While the propaganda promised a welcoming and safe return to their families, Stalin, in fact, considered repatriated Russians who had been captured by Germany to be traitors (hence the title of the book) and they were sent east to Siberia to serve long and severe prison terms in the famous gulags. For many, that meant certain death.

Agnes managed to escape repatriation by marrying a German-speaking Canadian soldier from rural Saskatchewan. It was more than a marriage of convenience and by 1946 as a Russian war bride, she was living in the flat, dry Canadian prairies in a tiny wooden shack with the family of her new husband. What began as a new life in a new land collapsed around her when her husband drowned in a tragic accident not long after arriving in Canada.

Moving on, Agnes got a job in a nearby prairie town working as a cook at the small local hotel where she met her next husband. It was with Eric Spicer that her life took root and together they started a family, including her daughter Roxana who wrote this book.

Her experiences as a war bride rang familiar to me after listening to my own grandmother’s stories about arriving from England after WW I and suffering great culture shock. My grandmother left behind a seaside home in Folkestone on the White Cliffs of Dover to come to a small rural Ontario town with no sea, no indoor plumbing, and no immediate family to help ease the transition. Educated and musical Agnes was likewise horrified at the primitive life and desolate landscape she encountered in her new homeland.

From a young age, Roxana Spicer knew her mother had a complicated and secret history during the war years. Agnes refused to divulge any details which only increased her daughter’s curiosity. Roxana attended Carleton University in Ottawa and became a journalist, writer, and filmmaker. Employing her professional skills, Roxana spent decades trying to untangle her mother’s backstory from snippets of information extracted from her mother, usually under duress.

The Traitor’s Daughter is the result of years of research, trips to Russia, Germany, and the U.K. and interviews with highly-placed historians to uncover the truth. While there are still gaps, she was mostly successful and her mother’s story is a fascinating read that I could not put down. This book is not an easy read and be prepared to be disavowed of some of the myths about the Allies always being the “good guys”. It is difficult to not use superlatives in describing Agnes’s story.

The author, Roxana Spicer is a baby boomer like us so her interpretation of events is relatable to those of us who came from families of veterans who endured WW2 and who were so often also unwilling to share stories of their experience. I highly recommend this book. I always like to support Canadian authors, especially when they write such amazing stories as The Traitor’s Daughter.

If you are unable to obtain The Traitor’s Daughter by Roxana Spicer at your local bookstore or library, click on this link to have it delivered directly to your door or tablet from Amazon.

(Disclosure: I may receive a teeny, tiny commission. Thank you.)