Wartime woes of Polish pair chronicled

By: Reviewed by Graeme Voyer Posted: 2:00 AM CDT Saturday, Apr. 1, 2023

Believing that the past is never dead, or even past, Toronto-based lawyer Marsha Faubert developed a profound curiosity about the experiences during the Second World War of her Polish mother-in-law and father-in-law, Wanda and Casey Surdykowski.

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Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 01/04/2023 (1284 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The couple was reticent about their wartime experiences, not even discussing them with their children. After Wanda and Casey died, Faubert determined to reconstruct their histories, embarking on a massive project of research.

Her book Wanda’s War is an intriguing account of what she learned.

Born in the 1920s, Wanda and Casey grew up in Poland (they did not meet until after they had emigrated to Canada in 1947).

Their lives were altered by the Second World War, during which Poland was brutally invaded by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.

As Faubert writes, “Wanda and Casey had survived horrific treatment and losses at the hands of Poland’s enemies.”

Wanda was conscripted by the Nazis into forced labour in Germany, while Casey was deported to Siberia by the Soviets for the same purpose.

After Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, the Soviets granted an amnesty to their Polish forced labourers. Casey joined the Polish army, and would eventually see combat with the Allies in Italy.

At the end of the war, both Wanda and Casey would participate in schemes for the resettlement of Poles in Canada.

The scheme that brought Wanda to Canada was particularly controversial.

A French Canadian businessman and Member of Parliament, Ludger Dionne, proposed to recruit 100 young Polish women from displaced persons camps in Europe in order to work in his textile mill in Saint-Georges, Que. Wanda was one of those selected.

The plan was implemented, but was the target of much criticism in Parliament and the media. It was argued that the women were underpaid; the terms of their employment effectively made them indentured servants.

Wanda and several of her friends left Quebec for Kitchener, Ont., which had a large Polish community since the middle of the 19th century. It was here she met Casey, who had come to Canada under a program designed to settle young Polish men and ex-soldiers as farm workers.

Wanda and Casey instinctively understood each other’s experience of the war. “What better way to settle into a new world,” Faubert says, “than with someone who shared one’s roots and understood one’s past, someone who spoke the same language, whose culture, food, and religion were familiar?”

Wanda and Casey adapted well to Canadian life, becoming citizens and raising two sons.

By recounting her in-laws’ stories, Faubert has humanized the suffering and tragedy of Poland’s war. She evokes the nightmarish conditions of Nazi and Soviet occupation. Her readable narrative raises universal themes of memory and silence, freedom, justice and forgiveness: it is a book packed with meaning.

Graeme Voyer is a Winnipeg writer.