The Traitor's Daughter

August 5, 2024
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. (Sept.)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.

August 1, 2024
A daughter sets out to discover how her mother managed to survive the bloodletting of World War-era Russia. "There is a Russian proverb, Roxana," Spicer's mother warns in this rollercoaster of a narrative. "Be careful where you dig, you may find worms." The author turns up worms aplenty in this work of investigative reportage, her subject her mother, who made her way from Russia across Europe and then to Canada during the tumultuous war years. What stories her mother told her didn't always add up: Why, for instance, did she leave home in the Ural Mountains at 15? Why did she have that fading tattoo, about which "it was forbidden to ask"? Why would Spicer's Canadian father have insisted that her Russian mother loved Stalin when her mother said, "That sonofabitch. Somebody should have killed the bastard." As Spicer conducted her research, working in Russian and German archives and visiting sites that may have been waystations on her mother's path, she gathered bits of truth. For example, her mother had had a Russian husband, about whom, confronted, she said, "Believe you me, after him, I was ready forthe camps." As a Red Army soldier, she was indeed a POW in concentration camps, proving useful to her captors because she was fluent in German. Did she have to do more, as did women prisoners forced into brothels at Ravensbr�ck and other camps? "I've been right in the middle of it. Every face of that rotten war," her mother said simply, safe in Saskatchewan after marrying a Canadian soldier to escape repatriation to Stalin's Russia and there likely being sent off to the Gulag as a traitor for having been captured in the first place. A work that ably interrogates memory and fact to highlight the difficulty of arriving at truth in history.

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