REVIEW: The Traitor’s Daughter: Captured by Nazis, Pursued by the KGB, My Mother’s Odyssey to Freedom from Her Secret Past by Roxana Spicer (2024)

JayneB Reviews / Book ReviewsCanada / Germany / Historical / mothers and daughters / non-fiction / prisoner of war / Russia / World War II5 Comments

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.

CW/TW – Spicer digs deep into her mother’s wartime past when Rosa was a POW, in a concentration camp, sold as a slave laborer in Germany and then dealt with the spousal abuse in her first marriage and the tragic death of her second husband. There are issues here galore.

Review

“Be gentle with her history.”

The subtitle of this book made it impossible for me to resist. Rosa sounds like she was one hell of a woman and also a woman who needed that grit and determination to survive blow after blow that life dealt her. At times this was not an easy book to read but then I’d remind myself that I wasn’t living it either and mentally shut up and get back to reading.

This isn’t just the story of Rosa Spicer and how she got from the Ural Mountains to Saskatchewan, Canada. It’s also Roxana’s lifelong pursuit of the truth of her mother’s life. Growing up Roxana would creep downstairs when she heard her mother put on an LP of the Red Army Chorus and then try to sit motionless as her mother would drink vodka and kahlua on the rocks and maybe crack a little, spilling precious details of her past life.

Rosa Spicer made a life for herself in Canada in a small one horse prairie town as a fabulous cook whose husband built her a little diner beside the family gas station. But everyone knew you didn’t mess with this woman no matter how tiny she was physically. Clues to Rosa’s past life used to arrive every now and then. Blue, thin papered letters from the USSR which her mother would read alone before putting them away in a squeaky dresser drawer.

“Is there something you still don’t know and it would be the worst thing you ever uncovered??”

Roxana grew up to be a reporter and eventually seemed to devote her life to discovering what her mother would never talk about – her life during WWII. When pressed, Rosa would ask why did her daughter want to know all this? “It’s past, it’s over.” She didn’t want to remember any of it, herself. There were times when a lifetime of not asking about certain things – such as the tattoo on her mother’s arm – would choke Roxana’s questions. Roxana would run up against destroyed documents, the deaths of eyewitnesses, government silence, and over and over her mother’s (almost) pleas to leave the past in the past.” Who cares? No one would believe me.”

Along the way she uncovers, bit by bit, little pieces and traces of her mother’s past. Certain possibilities pull Roxana up and have her question herself and how much does she really want to know. Her questions take her around the world and put her in contact with experts in the history of the Holocaust, researchers in the Netherlands determined to uncover dark secrets, relatives of the family in Germany who “bought” Rosa as slave labor for their dairy farm, and an eighty year old woman who remembers Rosa from those days and whose family treated her as a human being.

The last section of the book dove into the incredible efforts of the USSR after the war to claw back any citizen who had become a traitor merely by being captured or living in the West during the war. I didn’t realize how complicit most Allied governments were in this. Some Soviets desperately wanted to get home – unaware of what awaited them. Others were desperate to avoid going back but were forced into Soviet hands by Allied military (many of whom objected but were overruled) and European governments who worried about the possible fate of their own people still in Soviet controlled areas. Later when Rose tried to phone her sister in the USSR, she inadvertently almost sicced the KGB on Nela and her family.

There are some issues that Roxana laid to rest about her mother’s past while other things will probably never be known. I say probably as new AI tech is assisting in reading and digitizing what evidence is left and new details may be uncovered. The final pages recount Rosa’s only visit back to Russia after the end of the Cold War over fifty years after she left the Urals. The writing is, at times, a bit stream of conscious-esque but gripping all the same. B

~Jayne

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