Mother’s wartime secrets come to light in new memoir

Sometimes families live on a precipice surrounded by dark and terrible secrets. The Zebrowski family was just such a family.

The Golden Daughter is the intimate and powerful memoir of a daughter and her mother, the latter taken by the Nazis from her Ukrainian homeland in February 1943 and forced to work as a slave in Germany during the Second World War.

The author of this emotional story is Nova Scotia-based Halina St. James, who was a journalist for the CBC and CTV covering revolutions, wars and other international assignments. She also worked as a communications performance coach and professional speaker.

In the introduction, St. James tells us that “(m)ore than 5.7 million people were put to work as slaves in Germany by the Nazis… They were treated as subhuman, and many were worked to death.”

She also relates that just like many who did not talk about their war experiences, her mother rarely mentioned hers — or the complicated relationships she had been caught up in.

St. James reconstructs her late mother Maria’s life like pieces of a puzzle, from mother’s secret letters, other documents and archives as well as stories from other survivors and relatives.

Her research is thorough. She travels to Europe and traces her mother’s movements there, also travelling to different parts of Canada, uncovering the secrets that had impacted and so influenced her own life. She consults with historians, guides and translators along the way.

Written in an easy, conversational manner, The Golden Daughter is hard to put down. Although the content is difficult, the simplicity of the language makes the story easily accessible.

Most of the memoir is written in story form, with Maria as the main character. St. James added to the story those things she discovered from her research.

The latter portion of the memoir is written in the author’s voice, where she shares the discoveries found both during her travels and in her mother’s letters. “I was stunned,” St. James writes. “The letters told of a time when the world went mad, and how a pampered child learned to survive in the face of cruelty, hardship and terror.”

The title refers to St. James’s mother, who had been absolutely adored by both of her loving Ukrainian parents in her hometown of Vinnytsia. St. James says Maria “was their miracle child, born when Aniela and Sergei (Brik) were middle-aged and had lost all hope of having a child.” And so she became their “golden daughter.”

After her abduction at age 17, Maria courageously survived the war, married Stanislaw Zebrowksi, gave birth to Halina and then became involved with Frank Uzarowski, who ran off with Maria when the author was four. All of this was kept secret from Halina.

According to St. James’s website, in 2012 the writer suffered a stroke, robbing her of speech, and had to re-learn the alphabet in order to communicate, making the telling of her story even that much more remarkable. She was in her seventies, in 2022, when she went searching in earnest for her father, who disappeared when she was four.

The Golden Daughter is a story of war, of mankind’s cruelty, betrayal, deception and abandonment. But in the end it is also a heartfelt story of forgiveness, love and new beginnings.

Cheryl Girard is an Interlake-based writer.