The Agenda with Steve Paikin (Audio) - Unlocking a Mother's Hidden WWII History

Episode Date: October 30, 2024

After several decades of interviews and research, journalist and filmmaker Roxana Spicer is finally telling her mother's story. In her new book "The Traitor's Daughter: Captured by the Nazis, Pursued by the KGB, My Mother's Odyssey to Freedom from Her Secret Past," we learn what her mother kept hidden about her time in the Red Army and beyond.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

After several decades of interviews and research, journalist and filmmaker Roxana Spicer is finally telling her mother's story. In her new book, The Traitor's Daughter, captured by the Nazis, pursued by the KGB, my mother's odyssey to freedom from her secret past, we learn what her mother kept hidden about her time in the Red Army and beyond. And we're delighted to have Roxana Spicer here in our studio. Great to see you again. Thank you very much. It's a great pleasure to be here. This story is incredible. I mean, it's absolutely incredible.

And we're going to start with an excerpt and then we're off to the races. Okay? Sheldon, bring up the graphic if you would and here we go. It was during those Russian nights that I began to write my mother's story. I didn't understand then the connection between silence and sanity. I didn't know yet that to tell it was to relive it. She wanted to protect me and my two brothers as much as she wanted to protect herself. Things slipped out.

Fragmented tales with no beginning and no end, but with gripping details that went far beyond the safe stories about her life during World War II that she would share with friends. Details such as a knife-wielding Nazi soldier, rats, forced marches, eating bark from the trees to survive, and the camps. Okay, let's start there, Roxanna. These so-called Russian nights where you learn there is more to your mother's story than she previously told you. Describe those Russian nights.

Well, first of all, you have to picture me as a 10-year-old living in our house on the ... just off the number 7 highway in Netherhill, Saskatchewan, deepest rural Saskatchewan. While my brothers slept and my father had also gone to bed, I would hear the sounds of the Russian Red Army choir coming up from the living room. And this would be my cue to come downstairs and join my mother on the couch where she would be fortified by a healthy glass of vodka and Kahlua, what we call a black Russian, and her pack of cigarettes never far away. And she would, this music and this alcohol and this atmosphere, the midnight hours of Saskatchewan, she would begin to reveal bits and pieces of her story. Very, very fragmented, just bits and pieces.

So how old were you when you began to realize, my mom's not like every other mom here in Saskatchewan? Oh, I think I knew that from knee-high to a grasshopper, as they say in Saskatchewan. Really? The earliest stages of the game. I would say 10 years old, I started to literally take notes. I used to go up after her midnight sessions and write down a few little things about her. And eventually, I crafted the first essay about my mother

and presented that to our school. And that was a performance. That was one performance my mother didn't come to listen to. Take a look at the wall over there. We're going to bring up a picture. And I want you to tell us, what is the name of the person in that picture? That is Agni Rosa Nikolayevna Butorina.

That is my mother, and that is her complete name in Russian. In Russia, she was known as Rosa. In Canada, she was known by her Christian name, Agnes or Agni. And of course, to me, she was known as Mum. So she had three different faces, three different personas. And discovering the truth behind all of those names and putting all of that together is really the quest that I undertook in writing this book, which also took...

That was a solid seven years of writing. Most people's mothers don't have multiple names. Why did your mother have multiple names? Well, she was born in the very early days of the Russian, just shortly after the Russian Revolution, just before Lenin had decided to ban God from Russia, her grandmother snuck her out from the cradle and had her baptized with her name Agni. Her Russian name, however, was Rosa for Rosa Luxemburg, who was a heroine of the Russian Revolution.

This turned out to be a very fortuitous combination of events because when Mum was captured by the Nazis, the fact that her actual Russian name sounded Jewish meant that she was in high jeopardy. I mean, obviously, we know the history. To be captured by the Nazis and to be Jewish was pretty much a death sentence. So this is when she started going by her Christian name that she was given by the local priest. She started calling herself Agni. So that's the story of those two names. You were one of three siblings. Yes.

For whatever reason, you had some kind of burning desire to know about your mother's past, I think fair to say, far more than the other two siblings. Do you know why? That's a really intriguing question. I would say that both of my brothers shared the curiosity about mom. But they didn't write a 420-page book about her.

No. And one of your brothers is a twin. So particularly interesting. Right, exactly. And I think part of his personality, they're both very stalwart, prairie salt kind of quiet guys. But I think there's something special between a mother and a daughter. And for some reason, mom was more inclined to, well, I asked the questions.

As my twin brother once said, everyone in the family had a role to play, and my role was to ask the questions, or as mom would put it, to dig for the worms, which I did over a lifetime. As you started to do that, how forthcoming or not was she? My mother was notoriously silent. And as you noted in the segment that you read from the book, when I was pressing her for answers, or I should say actually, I want to be precise about this, I didn't actually

press her at all. What I did is I had patience and when she was in the mood I would just wait for her to occasionally drop these hints about what her life had been like before she became mom. I mean don't you think that every kid at some point looks at their parents and wonders you know who were they before they became mom and dad? Well I had that but I had that in spades. And I think the boys, my two brothers, relied on me to fulfill that role in the family, which I did. So when you asked her about her role in the Soviet Red Army, what I knew was that she could, that she was handed an instrument of war called the bazooka.

So she and her bazooka helper were responsible for managing this 50 pound anti-tank weapon on the Eastern Front. But as she said herself, when the Nazis surrounded them, there was no time to pull the trigger. In fact, if you indulge me, I would like to read just a small section of what actually happened at that moment of capture. Now I have to, this is a warning that you might want to have your bleeper machine ready because there's some pretty rough language in this, but I want to be true to my mother's authentic voice. This also is one of the first and probably one of the only coherent paragraphs mom made about her time on the Eastern Front. This is after the invasion, in the very early days of the invasion of three million Nazi

soldiers across the Russian front lines. This is not vodka, I wish it was, but I'm going to fortify myself with a little drink of water here. This is one of the few paragraphs I taped as well. The Germans overran Poltava. That's where we've been stationed. They just overran the town. No fighting, just swept. And then the first thing you know, we've been in the middle of the field. They tell you, take your boots off and your trousers and your tunic and keep your hands

above your head. And that was the end of the war for us for the next fucking three years. Heroes. for the next fucking three years. Heroes, you fucking heroes. I love that word. It describes so very well everything you feel. I'd like to get a drink. You've done something there that obviates the need for me to ask one of the questions on my page,

which was, I want to know what your mother sounded like, and you just did it. So I wasn't sure you were going to do that in her accent, but I'm glad you did. That's what she sounded like. That's the voice of my mother that I hear in my head, and that's the voice that I replicated in the audiobook as well. People tell me I've got it pretty close. And that's the voice that I replicated in the audiobook as well. People tell me I've got it pretty close. How much about what happened to your mother after she was captured by the Nazis do you think you really have a handle on?

I'll never know. I'll never know. What I do know is that I used every corpuscle in my being, every skill that I ever learned in journalism school, every nuance I ever learned from every executive director I ever worked with to bring all of that to bear to unravel her story. And I think I came pretty close. I mean, there are certain elements of the story that I will never be able to get a hold of. That's lost history. But I'm very satisfied that I was able to put together a coherent chronology of a very dramatic thousand days

in the life of my mother's life. Your mother had a number tattooed on herself, which is something that anybody who went to the Auschwitz death camp, concentration camp in Poland had. And yet, despite all of your curiosity and journalistic skill, you never wrote that number down. How often do you smack yourself for not having done that?

Never. You've forgiven yourself. I never, it's not even, it's not quite the right question with all due respect. Sure. Because you return to this over and over in the book about why didn't I just, how did I not notice that number? Why didn't I take it down? I think that question really pinpoints the quintessential tension that exists in the

book between myself as the daughter and myself as the journalist. Strictly speaking as the journalist, of course, it's the most obvious question. You know, your mother has a tattoo on her arm, and this predates everyone getting tattoos by decades. But this tattoo was very specific. This was a number tattoo. I recognized the tattoo as having numbers. But it was absolutely a family taboo

to look at my mother's arm, to ask her about this tattoo. And she, in fact, during the summertime in Saskatchewan, and you know how hot the Saskatchewan and you know how hot the Saskatchewan summers can be she would wear long sleeves to cover to cover that tattoo so we as growing up in Saskatchewan in Netherhill Saskatchewan understood that this was an incredible family taboo to the point and again just talking about this yin-yang conflict between the daughter and the journalist, I found myself in the middle of a raging snowstorm in Moscow in

2012 on my first real serious investigative trip to Russia to unlock that part of my mother's story and I scored an interview with a woman who would later become the recipient for the Nobel Peace Prize and talking about the co-founder of Memorial which is Russia's largest or was Russia's largest human rights organization. I got this interview with Irina Shcherbakova and for the first time I was going to be able to take those fragments that I heard during the midnight hours of Saskatchewan and test them against the bank of knowledge in this woman's head. She was without a doubt Russia's most preeminent historian and she remains so.

So Irina gave me four hours of her time and we're sitting across the desk as you and I are and I'm asking her all kinds of questions about the significance of the two names, the changing of the names and what life would have been like in the camps and all the rest and I had my coat on. I was almost literally out of the door. I said, by the way, my mother had a tattoo. And Irina turned to me and she said, your mother had a tattoo? Yes. A real tattoo? Yes. Here? She indicated to her arm. And she said it was numbers and I said yes and she said well that can only mean one thing that she was an inmate of Auschwitz. Did you

know that at that point? No this was this was a bombshell. This was it was a completely flabbergasting to me that my mother could have held that secret her entire life and I mean literally she never spoke about that. Your mother was essentially, I don't know, I don't want to exaggerate this, but would you call her a slave at some point in her life? No, that's not exaggerating. That's not exaggerating at all. Tell me what that was about.

Okay, so what happened was that after a period of captivity as a prisoner of war, Germany had a problem. They had three million guys fighting during the Second World War. They had, this basically stripped the country of workers. So Hitler decided that these prisoners of war should be reclassified as civilians. All of them should be, not all of them, but a good number of them should be brought into Germany, and they should be used as slave labor. Not just the prisoners of war, but Germany then went into the occupied territories in Ukraine, Poland, throughout Europe, and rounded up 13.5 million people.

Just consider that number for a second. The population of Canada during the Second World War was approximately 8 million people. This is an enormous number of people who were forced into slave labor, and my mother was one of those. After the war was over, did she want to return to her native Russia? I think she was deeply ambivalent about the notion of going back to Russia. I think emotionally she never left Russia. I think she was still very, I think she was filled with a sort of spiritual longing to see her homeland, to once again experience the love, I mean to see her sister was still living in the deepest red Russia

in the Ural Mountains that separate European Russia from Asiatic Russia. And... How many years did they go without seeing each other? Fifty years. Fifty. Fifty years. And Steve, had it not been for the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, she would never have had an opportunity for that extraordinary moment on the wooden planks of the railway

platform in Chusavoy, Russia. You got a picture of it. Go ahead, Sheldon, bring that picture up. This is a reunion 50 years in the making. And they sat there and, I guess, stood there and hugged each other for how long before saying anything? I think you said four and a half minutes in the book. It was exactly right.

And the reason that I know that is because I filmed that moment. I think you said four and a half minutes in the book. It was exactly right. And the reason that I know that is because I filmed that moment. And again, we were talking earlier just briefly about this conflict between being a daughter and being a journalist. This was a real classic moment of conflict. So part of me wanted to be part of this reunion. I wanted to put the camera down. I wanted someone to hug me. But I stepped back, and I gave the platform literally

and figuratively to my mother. I didn't want to interfere with this moment that she had dreamt about in one fashion or another for half a century. We have a clip of your mother talking to you about her time after the war. Let's play that, shall we? Sheldon, if you would. Mom, at the point at which you turn, why did you turn around? Because where else could I be going?

But why did you stop walking towards Russia. Roksana, across the Rhine, nobody let me through. The Americans troops been coming in, but I took a swim. I want to hear about that. Yes, I took a swim in the Rhine River. Because it's famous river. I've been walking for days. You wouldn't believe. It's almost like she's saying to you there, you know, she's pissed off that you're asking such a ridiculous question, is what it sounds like to me.

Is that how you took it? I think that again this was another moment in which she had decided to open up and again you obviously I had an unmanned camera set up there for a dinner party at my home in Toronto and Just to set the context for this. This is really part of history, the Second World War history that isn't well known. You know, in these, in the first days after the surrender of Germany, Germany itself was in, it was, as Mum described, it was hell. It was hell for the civilians.

The railways were bombed out. As Mum said, the American troops were coming in as occupying forces. The British were coming in. And there was no way for Mum to get back to Russia unless, well, she had been held as a slave laborer for 13 months in the last 13 months of the war. She was desperate to get home. She wasn't going to get a ride on a train or in a truck.

She decided she would walk. But fortunately, she was walking in the wrong direction. And I want to explain what I mean when I say fortunately because the at the moment of capture in the eyes of Joseph Stalin my mother and all the other prisoners of war of Soviet Russia were considered to be traitors. The fact that they so-called in Stalin's eyes allowed themselves to be captured meant they had betrayed the motherland. So if she had been successful, if she had actually been turned around, hadn't got herself all turned around and was walking in the wrong direction and she had made it to the Russian occupation zone of Germany, she would have been subjected to the most brutal kind of interrogation in the so-called filtration camps, she would have been automatically

assumed to have been a spy by virtue of the fact that A, she survived the camps and B, that she spoke fluent German. That's what allowed her to survive, right? The fact that she spoke fluent German was critical to her ability to survive, definitely. I mean, I just want to say about the question of my mother's survival. I've given so much thought to it. And you know, how is it? And she asked that question of herself.

How is it that of all the millions who didn't make it, why did she survive? My first thought is, you know, it's very visceral. It's very sort of like comic book hero. It's like, well, of course she survived. I mean, she could pick a handful of kitchen knives and throw them across the room in a perfect pattern around a frying pan. She knew how to use a knife.

One of her confidants from Saskatchewan described her hands as mortal weapons. She was a small woman, but she was very capable of handling herself physically. But whatever her physical courage was, her physical strength, I think the reason that she really survived, in combination with her ability to speak German was the fact that she never lost hope that one day she would make it back to Russia, that she would be home, that she would be reunited with her family, and that she would also unravel the mystery about what

had happened to her own mother. So even though the book on, in many ways my book, I mean it's a war story. It's told very specifically through the eyes of a woman. But it's also a mother-daughter story through the generations, not just my mother and myself, but there's a story there about my mother and her mother. So it's what plays out on a number of different levels. And tell us how she ended up in Canada. I need another vodka.

No, it's too early for that. At the end of the war, as I described earlier, she was stranded in Germany in the same town where she had worked as a slave laborer for a local German farmer for about 13 months. But the Canadian troops came in with the British and they occupied the town. And one of those Canadian soldiers was a very handsome guy, a prairie boy, whose name was Jack File. And he met my mother. He could speak German.

He met my mother and a couple of other Russian young women while they were all out picking raspberries. And he asked her out to a dance, and one thing led to another, the way Mom describes it. And he fell in love with her. He married, he would eventually marry her. But how she got specifically out of Germany at this time was swarming with Russians who were coming, these secret agents of Stalin who were coming to round up the Russian stragglers and bring them back to Russia whether they wanted to go or not. And Mum knew that she would be in, she had to get out of Germany.

Not running from the Nazis now, but escaping from Stalin's secret agents called Smersh, and I can come back to that in a minute. So what happened was Jack and a priest from Edmonton concocted a plan to put mom into a Canadian army uniform, put her in the backseat of a Canadian Jeep, told her to keep her hands hidden because they're small, keep her head down, keep her mouth shut, and they flew across the border in this Jeep from Bad Selsuflend in northwest Germany into Holland. And that's how she

got out of Germany several months later. She finds herself in Amsterdam. That is where the photograph that graces the cover of the book was taken. And she's engaged and she got married. So she became one of Canada's, well, she became the only war bride from Russia officially registered by the Canadian Immigration Museum, by the National, Department of National Defense. How long did that marriage last? That was a very bittersweet and short-lived marriage by virtue of the... I have mixed feelings describing this because had it not been for the unfortunate accident of what happened to Jack, I wouldn't be here describing the story. That is the point I'm trying to make.

He died. Yeah. But if he didn't die, and alas, subject your mother to even more misery than she'd already experienced, she wouldn't have remarried Mr. Spicer, and you wouldn't be here. Yeah, I know it's really, I have to say, just to fill this in, shortly after Jack and Agnes got to rural Saskatchewan, they decided to celebrate a homecoming of another Russian army, another, I'm sorry, Canadian army buddy.

They decided to go for a picnic beside the Saskatchewan River, Jack went in to save a little girl who got caught in quicksand in the Saskatchewan River. He got caught in quicksand, and he drowned. But once again, she found herself stranded. But this time, she was stranded in rural Saskatchewan. And I do comment to myself sometimes, Steve, that I owe my existence to the quicksand of the Saskatchewan River because she did marry my father a couple years later. Your mother died in a Calgary hospital in 2009, so she has been long gone as they say.

What were her last days like? Well you know of all the sections in the book that I've written there's that particular scene that I described in the palliative care center in Calgary is one of the few scenes that I cannot bring myself to read. I know that seems unbelievable. It's one of the it's one of the few scenes that I wrote once and I didn't change it. So I will relive it for you but it's I have to tell you it's really quite difficult for me to go back there. In the last hours of my mother's life something quite extraordinary happened and I was witness

to this. During her entire life, her 86 years, I had never mother's voice yelling in German at the nurses, mistaking them for SS women, for Nazi guards. She was hallucinating. She was hallucinating. I've since discovered, and perhaps I know that you've also done some research into Holocaust survivors, that this isn't so, this isn't completely unusual. That in those last hours, you know, the memory, the brain, it goes back to those suppressed memories come back to the surface.

But to be a witness to that, that was devastating. Let's do one last question here, and that is Russia Today. Can you, given what you've written, can you go back to Russia Today? You've been there many, many times. Can you go back? I've been to Russia 13 times in the course of doing research for this book and for a couple of other documentaries. I can't go back and that's a really bitter irony for me that my mother couldn't go to Russia, her homeland, for 50 years and now 30 years later I will never be able to

step foot on Russian soil again, I believe, because Putin has since criminalized anything that calls into question how the Red Army behaved during the Second World War. And this book is a very visceral recounting of, you know, just how, as to put it in mum's words that it was a miracle that the that the that the Red Army won the war the way that the army was the way the the way the army was run it was a miracle that the the war was won at all. I wish I'd asked her more about that I think that she was referring very specifically to the fact that she was, they were never supposed to be captured.

If you were to go to Russia today, if you did go to Moscow and if you were to visit the so-called Great Patriotic War Museum, which dominates, sprawls over city block after city block in central Moscow, you would not find a single word or a single first person account from a prisoner of war. As far as Putin is concerned, during the Second World War, there were no prisoners. There were actually well over, I think, there were a million and a half men and women

who were captured by the Nazis in the first eight months of the war. This history has been written out of the official narrative in today's Russia. So no, I definitely would not, I wouldn't feel safe getting back off the plane in the Sheremetyevo Airport in Moscow. Well, he may have eliminated it from the history there, but it's all in here. You've done an incredible job putting this all together. The Traitor's Daughter, captured by the Nazis, pursued by the KGB, My Mother's Odyssey to Freedom from Her Secret Past, Roxanna Spicer.

Thanks a lot. Thank you, Steve.