The Traitor’s Daughter: Captured by Nazis, Pursued by the KGB, My Mother’s Odyssey to Freedom from Her Secret Past

Journalist Spicer debuts with a captivating memoir of her quest to uncover her mother’s wartime secrets. Agnes Spicer, who was born in 1922 Russia as Rosa Butorina, arrived in Canada in 1948, having married a soldier who freed her from Nazi internment. Spicer recalls how her mother’s adventuresome war stories (e.g., dodging mines while swimming across the Rhine) never jibed with darker memories (“Forced marches. Eating bark from the trees”) that came out during late-night vodka sessions with “the Red Army Choir on the hi-fi.” Spicer narrates her “journalistic effort to piece it all together,” which included a 1991 meetup with a Russian aunt who revealed Agnes had eloped to Ukraine in 1941 with an abusive secret police officer but quickly fled him to join the Red Army. Further research trips take a surprise turn, as Spicer discovers Agnes likely served as a translator in the Nazi camps where she was interred, and was sought for decades afterward by the KGB as a traitor. Spicer unravels her tale at a tantalizing pace, building a kaleidoscopic portrait of her enigmatic mother (who never sits with her back to the door and is revealed to be an expert knife-thrower during moments of PTSD-like hypervigilance). The result is both a wrenching depiction of a woman determined to bury her past and an eye-opening exploration of the fate of WWII’s Soviet POWs. (Sept.)