Like many Baby Boomers, I grew up in the shadow of World War II. My father was a bomber pilot whose plane was shot down days after D-Day; he was MIA (missing in action) and a POW (prisoner of war) in a hospital in German-occupied France for three months, where the doctors did such a terrible job of setting his leg that they left him with a permanent disability. My mother was a nurse who, despite numerous traumatizing experiences, survived The Great Depression, graduated from nursing school, and worked in Vancouver’s Shaughnessy Hospital when it was a veterans’ hospital. That’s where they met, he in a hospital bed after surgeons rebroke and reset his leg, she a nurse on his ward over the months while his leg healed. I know this because my mother occasionally spoke of it; my father never did. 

Silence was the case for Marsha Faubert’s mother- and father-in-law, Wanda and Casey. It was as if their lives only began when they set foot in Canada—and maybe, in a way, they did. After they’d both died, while clearing out their house to sell it, Faubert (class of 2018) came across a tin of old photos and bits of memorabilia. She’d always been curious but never felt she should push them to talk, but now she began using those bits and pieces as starting points to explore and understand what happened to them.

The result is Wanda’s War: An Untold Story of Nazi Europe, Forced Labour, and a Canadian Immigration Scandal (Goose Lane Editions, 2023). This well-researched and compassionately written story describes aspects of World War II that I never learned about in school, including the cruelties inflicted by the Nazis against Polish people—and presumably other Slavs, a large ethnic and linguistic group that encompasses much of Eastern Europe, whom the Nazis considered subhuman. (Although their primary target was Jews, the Nazis persecuted and imprisoned millions more people: Roma, people with disabilities, LGBTQ+ people—anyone who didn’t fit their idea of a “master race.”) Like many other Poles, Wanda was taken from her home and deported to Germany, where she was forced into slave labour in factories. Others, like Casey, who lived in a part of Poland that was under Soviet control, were shipped off to gulags in Siberia, from which they were “liberated” two years later, only to be conscripted by the Soviets to fight the Nazis. 

Adding insult to injury, their introduction to Canada involved recruitment into two years of indentured servitude, living in restrictive conditions and working for minimum wage in factories (Wanda) and on farms (Casey). No doubt, conditions in Canada were better than under the Nazis or the Soviets, but as one Canadian official said (to deaf ears), these people, who had somehow survived six years of hell, went “From slave labour to slave labour” on government-sanctioned programs, as a condition of immigrating to Canada. By comparison, British men and women arriving in Canada at the same time with the intent of citizenship were not subjected to any such requirements. 

In a book this well researched and written, it’s nearly impossible to pick out a single passage to quote, and certainly not a short one. The paragraphs below describe a time long after the war when Wanda’s son George, the author’s husband, learned about a compensation fund for people who had been forced labourers in Nazi Germany:

George called Wanda to tell her about her right to make a claim for compensation. She was unenthusiastic. “What’s the point?” she said. “It was so long ago.” George prodded her. … To him, a busy arbitrator, accustomed to hearing labour grievances, it was simple: fill out the form, send it in, wait for the decision. It seems insensitive, in retrospect, that we didn’t consider that it might not have been simple to Wanda, digging up a memory that she preferred to leave undisturbed. …

The form asked for a description of what happened during her period of forced labour, including the conditions in which she was held. For the first and last time, she told George what had happened to her in Germany. He wrote it down for her:

We lived in a barracks behind barbed wire. Every morning the guards took us to work. We worked from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m., I think. There were armed guards in the factory watching us while we worked. In the morning before we worked, they gave us one slice of bread and black coffee. For lunch we had kohlrabi soup and a slice of bread. For dinner, we had a slice of bread and black coffee. There was one Italian, two Russian, and four Polish barracks. There were 21 of us in a 25-foot by 12-foot room in three-high bunks. We were not ever allowed to go outside for any reason except to go to work. There were armed guards outside the barracks. We worked seven days a week. The guards would beat at us [sic] for no reason. The barracks were filthy and full of lice and bedbugs. When the Allies were bombing the area we were not allowed to leave the barracks and go to a bunker.

Wanda gave as little detail as possible. She didn’t tell George about the day she was taken and deported to Germany. They didn’t have a conversation about life during the Russian and German occupations or during her time in the camp. She didn’t talk about being hungry or afraid or how she felt about losing her home. She didn’t offer any of the details we later heard from Joe [George’s uncle]. The form didn’t require this information and she didn’t volunteer it.

I’ve wondered sometimes about my father’s silence about the war. I know he, like other military men, were told to forget their experiences and just live happy lives. I also know he suffered from PTSD, not clearly defined at the time, and went to therapy. But I wonder too, if, as Faubert concludes, “Silence was Wanda’s answer to the past and her protection in the present. Silence was her right. Who is to say that the burial of her memories, the simple life in a safe space, wasn’t justice for her?”

I’d never thought about it that way, but who indeed? 

Reviews of MFA alumni books on war and subsequent immigration:

How to Share an Egg: A True Story of Hunger, Love, and Plenty, by Bonny Reichert

Peace by Chocolate: The Hadhad Family’s Remarkable Journey from Syria to Canada, by Jon Tattrie