The Traitor's Daughter
Captured by the Nazis, Pursued by the KGB, My Mother's Odyssey to Freedom from Her Secret Past
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
INSTANT NATIONAL BESTSELLER
The masterful narration of a daughter's decades-long quest to understand her extraordinary mother, who was born in Lenin's Soviet Union, served as a combat soldier in the Red Army, and endured three years of Nazi captivity—but never revealed her darkest secrets.
As a child, Roxana Spicer would sometimes wake to the sound of the Red Army choir. She would tip-toe downstairs to find her mother, cigarette in one hand and Black Russian in the other, singing along. Roxana would keep her company, and wonder....
Everyone in their village knew Agnes Spicer was Russian, that she had been a captive of the Nazis. And that was all they knew, because Agnes kept her secrets close: how she managed to escape Germany, what the tattoo on her arm meant, even her real name.
Discovering the truth about her beloved, charismatic, volatile mother became Roxana's obsession. Throughout her career as a journalist and documentarian, between investigations across Canada and around the world, she always went home to ask her mother more questions, often while filming.
Roxana also took every chance to visit the few places that she did know played a role in her mother's story: Bad Salzuflen, Germany, home to POW slave labourers during the war; notorious concentration camps; and Russia. Under Gorbachev, Yeltsin, and the early years of Putin, she was able to find people, places, and documents that are now—perhaps forever—lost again.
The Traitor's Daughter is intimate and exhaustively researched, vividly conversational, and shot through with Agnes Spicer's irrepressible, fiery personality. It is a true labour of love as well as a triumph of blending personal biography with sweeping history.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Journalist Spicer debuts with a captivating memoir of her quest to uncover her mother's wartime secrets. Agnes Spicer, who was born in 1922 Russia as Rosa Butorina, arrived in Canada in 1946, having married a soldier who freed her from Nazi internment. Spicer recalls how her mother's adventuresome war stories (e.g., dodging mines while swimming across the Rhine) never jibed with darker memories ("Forced marches. Eating bark from the trees") that came out during late-night vodka sessions with "the Red Army Choir on the hi-fi." Spicer narrates her "journalistic effort to piece it all together," which included a 1992 meetup with a Russian aunt who revealed Agnes had eloped to Ukraine in 1941 with an abusive secret police officer but quickly fled him to join the Red Army. Further research trips take a surprise turn, as Spicer discovers Agnes likely served as a translator in the Nazi camps where she was interred, and was sought for decades afterward by the KGB as a traitor. Spicer unravels her tale at a tantalizing pace, building a kaleidoscopic portrait of her enigmatic mother (who never sits with her back to the door and is revealed to be an expert knife-thrower during moments of PTSD-like hypervigilance). The result is both a wrenching depiction of a woman determined to bury her past and an eye-opening exploration of the fate of WWII's Soviet POWs. Correction: A previous version of this review had the incorrect dates for Agnes's arrival in Canada and the author's meetup with her Russian aunt.
