Stan's birthday

Wow, this is serendipity, I thought. Today, January 30, I just finished the third, and hopefully final, draft of my book and sent it to my editor. That’s a cause for celebration on its own, But here’s the happy coincidence. Today is the birthday of my birth father, Stanisław Żebrowski.

That's Stanislaw, standing top right in this picture taken with friends just before he left to fight the Germans who invaded his homeland in 1939.

The book I just finished, The Golden Daughter, tells of my search for Stan, for the truth about my mother and her ordeal as a Nazi war slave, and a love triangle that shaped their lives, and mine, profoundly.

My mother left my father when I was four years old. So I don’t really remember him. I was brought up by my step father. I only know about Stanisław because, in my late teens, I found my birth certificate from the Displaced Persons camp in Germany where I was born.

My search for him ended at an unmarked grave in Kirkland Lake, Ontario. To learn more about the man, I travelled to Poland and found his family. I went from thinking I had no relatives, to being blessed with a large, distinguished family that had ties to Polish nobility and a Nobel prize winner.

That's just a part of the story behind The Golden Daughter, due to be published by Canada’s prestigious House of Anansi Press in August this year.

Tonight, I will toast my father whose life, like my mother’s, was forever changed by the madness and chaos of WWII. And I will toast the completion of the book, which is dedicated to the 5.7 million people - like my mother - who were forced to work as slaves in German factories, farms and homes in those darkest of days.