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Masthead News
March, 2025
EXTRACT: When Halina St James found a handful of old letters after her mother died, they took her on a journey of discovery that changed her life. The letters, in Russian, tell the story of how Halina's mother Mary, then just 17, was abducted from school in Ukraine by Nazi soldiers and sent to work as a slave in Germany during World War 2.
In one letter, Mary's father remembers his last sight of the child he called his golden daughter "behind the barbed wire with a chunk of black bread, weeping bitterly."
Now Halina has written The Golden Daughter: My Mother's Secret Past as a Ukrainian Slave Worker in Nazi Germany, to be published by the House of Anansi in August. Halina delivered the manuscript two weeks ago and the book is already available for pre-order from Indigo and Amazon.
Halina describes the book as a journey into a painful past, but which helped her find understanding, forgiveness and love.
Masthead News
May, 2023
EXTRACT: I always thought the samovar in my dining room was a family heirloom. It wasn't. It was one of my grandmother’s last gifts, a final effort in 1965 to maintain a link with the daughter she had not seen for more than 20 years.Today, when I look at the samovar, I see much more than a traditional Russian appliance for making tea. I see it as a way for my grandparents to ease a feeling of guilt over the fate of their only child Maria - my mother. In 1943, when she was 17, Maria was snatched from school in Ukraine by Nazi soldiers and sent to work as a slave in Germany. She never saw her parents again.
Masthead News
January, 2023
EXTRACT: I solved the mystery of what happened to my father. He disappeared from my life when I was four years old. This past fall I learned about the hard-scrabble life he led, and the last years of his life. My discoveries led me to an unmarked grave in a hilltop cemetery in a down-on-its-luck mining town in Northern Ontario.
Main-Post, Wurzburg
July, 2022
EXTRACT: After Maria Brik died in 2018 at the age of 92, her daughter Halina St James found over 60 letters. Written in Russian and Polish by Brik's parents and their friends. The documents tell of the life young Maria Brik, a former labourer in the German Reich. "These letters brought me to Wurzburg," says St James, her voice breaking slightly.
Schweinfurter Tagblatt
July, 2022
EXTRACT: Halina St. James traveled to Germany in May 2022 to visit all the places where she could follow traces of her mother. An employee of the "Initiative against forgetting" led them to the site of the former forced labor camp on the Oberndorfer Wiesen. Although the camp barracks have disappeared, the past became tangible through the erected information boards and verbal explanations.
