The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - Two Authors, Two Great Books - A Wednesday Special

Episode Date: September 24, 2025

No encore this week; instead, we're featuring two mini interviews with first-time authors who have great stories to tell. Both are friends and former colleagues of mine .... former CBC foreign correspondent Brian Stewart on his new book, On The Ground;  and former CBC field producer Halina St. James on her remarkable book, The Golden Daughter.  Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here. You're just moments away from the latest episode of The Bridge. It's Wednesday. Normally Wednesdays mean an encore edition of the program, but not on this day. Today, a new program, two authors who I'm convinced will be best-selling authors this fall. That's coming right up. And hello there. Yes, Peter Mansperch, you're on a Wednesday. And it's a new show.

It's not an encore edition. We're going to do this occasionally, just to keep things interesting. Some Wednesdays, we may do an in-bit show. Other Wednesdays, in fact, it will be an encore edition. But not on this day. As always, there are a lot of books coming out. and they usually tend to start really coming out around this time of year because they're in there for the Christmas sales market.

I know that, a number of my books were always time to come at this time of year. And next year, at this time of year, the latest one from Mark Bulgutche and myself will be coming out. But today, I'm not talking about me or Mark, we're talking about two authors who just happen to be two people who at different times in my career I've worked with. So I'm looking forward to that. And the first one up today

won't be a stranger to longtime listeners of the bridge because a couple of years ago my friend and colleague Brian Stewart who was a foreign correspondent for the CBC for years. And before that was a parliamentary correspondent, we were together in the Ottawa Parliament Hill Bureau of the CBC. Anyway, Brian, a couple of years ago, was on here most Mondays, talking about usually Ukraine-Russia.

And after years of being told, you know, Brian, you've got to write a book. You've got such a remarkable history as a foreign correspondent. You've got to tell these stories. And he always resisted. You know, and I was one of those who used to push him. You've got to do this. He said, no, no, no.

Nobody wants to hear my stories. And I don't want to write them. And, you know, I'm not a good writer, which is crazy. He's a great writer. Anyway, he resisted for years and finally Simon and Schuster persuaded him in O'Brien, you've got to write that book. And so now

he's written it. It's called On the Ground. My Life is a Foreign Correspondent. And it has just been released in the last week. So you've probably seen or heard Brian appearing in different places talking about his book. And that's what he's going to do again today.

But he's come back to the program that he was a frequent visitor with us and helped guide us through those early days of the war between Russia and Ukraine. And when he left to start writing his book, he said, I can't do that anymore. I just, I can't do anything else. I've got to focus on this book. Which is what he did, and I'm telling you, it's well worth it. It is an incredible read, and you can find it, bookstores everywhere, as of now. So, obviously, I wanted to talk to Brian.

Without giving away all the stories in the book, I wanted to talk to him about, I guess, the process. So that's how we're going to start off today's program. by this chat with my friend Brian Stewart. So Brian, I've been, you know, plowing through these reviews that you've been getting on the book. And they're all great, great reviews. And wonderful things that people are saying about you. And I've got to go with this one.

It's from Mark Starwitz, who was your boss and my boss through many years of the CBC. He was the creator of As It Happens at radio and then the journal at CBC television, an extremely talented guy, award-winning journalist, et cetera, et cetera. So in his review of your book, he compares you with Ernest Hemingway.

Now, what more could one ask for than that? When you read that, what did you think? Well, I thought if I had been reading this when I was 15 to 20 at that range, when I adored Hemingway and everything he could write, I would have probably died on the spot. Now I read it, and I say, Mark, come on, back off, back off, Mark a bit. You know, it's very flattering, of course. Excuse me, I don't think it's entirely accurate.

I don't think I'm going to win a Nobel Prize. Well, Hemingway was, among other things, a great storyteller and a great writer, both of which you are. And, you know, as one of the many who tried to convince you over the years that you had to write a book, that was what we pushed for because we knew you were a great writer. You always have been back in your print days and newspaper. But a great storyteller, mainly because you've been in a great storyteller. mainly because you've been in the middle of so many stories. So you had the qualifications.

And I certainly had to try because, as I mentioned, growing up, I just absorbed everything Hemingway would write. And to me, that was the highest form of life, to be traveling abroad and exotic places and writing as well as you can about them. You know, I have some quali—I have some qualms about his style now, But at that time, I really would have really adored Hemingway. And yes, he kind of represented for me the kind of perfect life of the person who absorbs the feeling for the land, the people, the customs, the light, the sound, the rest of it.

And it manages to put it into a pretty good writing style. So I'm deeply flattered still. I have to go back to that, even though I think it's a little of stretch. Now, one of the reasons you resisted doing this all those years was, well, you tell me, why did you resist? Because you always had, you know, the reason to write about what you'd done, especially when you started, you know, basically when you went into retirement. Why did you resist? Well, you know, for several reasons. One was, I was always affected by a quote of the British playwright and author, The Somerset Maughn,

but he was once asked to put himself in perspective, historical perspective. And he said, I see myself in the first row of the second rate. And without being false modded, I didn't see myself as really having so great a story to tell. And the second reason would be I kind of hanker to write something like an espionage novel. But if I was going to write it all, I really want to do a spy novel or historical spy novel.

When I looked at my life, I also felt, you know, some of those would be very painful because of the things you saw in the course of your career, you've relived maybe sometimes too often, maybe sometimes too darkly and too deeply. And do you really want to go back into all that again? Of course, what balanced that out when I finally did was you also go back into the wild and fun and spectacular days of our career and our lives.

So if what I thought would be a very, very painful exercise became one that was actually very enjoyable in the main, in the main, not always, but one in which I got a great rewarding experience from. So in a way, I obviously have to thank you for that, because I know you were the one who went to the publishers. So I'm an issue with the idea that I should write my memoir. And if you hadn't done that, maybe this would never have come up. And I would never have been compared to Hemingway.

Let me go back to the pain part of it. Because as you concede, there were moments of pain in doing this. Not surprisingly, given some of the play. places you'd mean, some of the stories that you covered, you know, everybody associates you with the Ethiopia story, the famine there, and the things that you discovered and told the world about. I mean, Bob Geldof gives a great mention about you in some of the credits on the book. But it wasn't just Ethiopia. You saw a lot. How hard has it been to deal with that? And, you know, you're not alone.

This is kind of one of the hidden stories about a lot of journalists who've seen the kind of things you've seen over the years and have tried to keep it to themselves or have needed help in doing just that. Talk to me about the pain and how you've dealt with that over time. Well, part of the time I didn't deal with it at all well, because like many journalists, I didn't examine myself fully enough, and I didn't seek professional guidance despite the kind of scenes we were seeing. The profession of foreign correspond were very late in the day to even acknowledge the danger of PTSD, which was a very strong risk factor, of course, for people out in daring and dangerous areas. is. But there's another thing that foreign correspondents get to witness things over and over and over again. And they do so often just standing by, watching, watching people shot, watching people starve to death, watching people in apartment buildings that have been blown to smithereens.

bodies carried away. And, you know, unlike some aid workers or medics, doctors, the rest of it, being a witness can leave you with a tremendous guilt feelings. You didn't quite do enough. And what bothered me most of all was not PTSD, which I didn't have, but I did have something that is now defined as, you know, moral injury, an injury that happened. really to the soul. If you're the witness of all these things, no matter how much good you may do, how much you may persuade yourself, you've done good, there's this feeling,

you know, why didn't I stop of the van and take up that refugee woman and her three children trying to reach to a feeding center or the other fan? But then you'd pick her up with a man, you'd have to leave 100,000 others behind or go into your pocket. Could you have done a little bit more to live up your highest standards. And I think I certainly suffered from that and had something approaching a nervous breakdown years later, many years after that, because I kept getting flashbacks to the people I had witnessed who I think I may have helped more than I did or helped in some way at least. Very often you're also cast into an area where you're the only one. You're there before the medics arrive.

You're there before doctors enter the feeding center because they have so many others to look after. And you're alone with hundreds of people and their mothers holding up their dying children to you. And I didn't know medical training. I don't know what to do. I wouldn't even know what to advise in that situation. And you just are helpless.

And that feeling of helpless can lead into guilt as well. The other thing, too, is soldiers suffer from it often. But when they see horrors of war where they feel they should have intervened to stop, say, a massacre or the mistreatment of civilians, but they didn't for one reason or another. They will, many decades later, even, will feel guilt that they didn't do more to help those people. So it's called moral injury, and it's a very serious thing that has to be dealt with. It can't just be shrugged off. Fortunately, I've got a very good treatment for it and then passed it now and well over it. So that would really be the things that when I was thinking of going back into my stories,

I mean, a lot of my stories, I was looking forward to revisiting, but some would bring forth that feeling of Ethiopia or Beirut or Afghanistan, where you felt maybe you could have done more, but you didn't. No matter how much you do, that is good, you're still going to feel you could have done more. One of the things that I, one of the many things that I like about your book is the fact that you talk about the team atmosphere of covering these stories, whatever they may be. Because we tend to think, and we tend to place a lot of the attention on the one figure, you know, the journalists who we see, who we hear through these reports. and in that case, of course, it was you. It was Brian Stewart reporting from wherever he might be in the world

that the world's attention was on. But you talk about how there's a team needed to make this happen. You know, there's obviously the camera, there's sound, there's the producer. There's, you know, in some cases now, you know, that has to be security. but to make that team work to produce the end product that has an impact on viewers, you know, potentially anywhere in the world, talk to me about that aspect

because I think it doesn't get mentioned publicly enough that it's, you know, it's more than one person there. Yeah, you know, it's funny, not funny, but I've said a couple of times recently that I never felt smaller than I was covering the biggest story in my life and that was in Ethiopia and we were going to alert in Canada and the world

because you're overwhelmed by the magnitude of what you have to cover but also by the factor you rely on so many other people. This team is absolutely vital. I mean, I had a brilliant cameraman Philippe B.R. My producer, I couldn't ask for it better, Tony Berman.

You know, well. And also, Back in, we forget, too, back in Toronto and headquarters, there are figures who were playing, demanding the story, be played high. We could have sunk it down on the bottom of the newscast, but no, they wanted it to go first. And there was John Owen, and of course, there was yourself. And the figures like that were also playing a major role. So I always felt I was just one part of a very big team. And I was so proud of the CBC at that stage because it was one.

One of those periods of the CBC where it actually was flawless, it was so professional, it was so serious, it took the situation far more serious even than the BBC did, because we stayed longer than anyone. We did more reports than anyone in the world, the CBC. You know, as I say, in Toronto, we had John Owen, who again we both know who was pushing that story. And one moment I really struck me was after that first report went over November the 1st, 1984, you called me immediately from the studio and said, I don't think you have any idea how big this story is going to be. There's people in the studio here crying, having witnessed these scenes. And then you said something that I've often remembered that this story will stay with you for the rest of your life. And it did exactly that.

But it always stays with me by in part remembering that great team we had, the great moment, CBC had. And beyond the CBC, there was a reaction of Canada. It became in a way part of the team. The Canadian government hurled itself into this mission. And the Canadian public, as a partner of the government, responded in a way in peace time. It never has before and probably never will again in terms of humanitarian effort for a place very far overseas. So those are, that's the reason why you kind of feel small, even though people will say that was your biggest story ever, what it was, but there were a lot of people involved in that story. Another aspect of it, if I could, one of the things that was the biggest pressure of all of us in the field, and when we arrived, it was, it was bigger than anything we had ever imagined or could imagine.

It was like an apocalypse, a world after nuclear holocaust, the dead, the dust, the dying. And it was so overwhelming. But the other thing is, we were getting any sleep. We were in the field for days on end. We were not eating properly. But above all, the sleep factor was so great. And we're surrounded by illness. One of my many terrors was one of us goes sick.

I mean, if Tony Berman goes down, he's the producer, I can step in and do a pretty lousy job of being a producer. You know my organizational skills, Peter. But if Philippe B.R, the cameraman goes down, either Tony nor I can pick up his camera. The sound man goes down, maybe, maybe we might be able to operate that. John Axelson, by the way, was sound. So we couldn't allow ourselves to get sick,

even though we were really physical wrecks. My hands were shaking so much. I found it hard to even write in my notebooks. They were shaking from the stress, the exhaustion, the sleep deprivation. So, yeah, that's again where the team effort was vital because we all had to stay healthy, or at least going, performing, and we all had to do the best job basically of our lives.

My last segment in this interview is about the media itself. I mean, you talk about the impact that coverage of that story had. First years and the BBC and then everybody else started to get into it. There was a worldwide relief effort, and Canada did extremely proud during that. But it was basically led by television coverage, your coverage. That's what started it. Governments responded, business responded, people responded. It was the second time in about five years, nothing compares to the Ethiopia story,

but five years before it had been the Vietnamese boat people. And the same kind of thing where international media dropped in, covered the story, pictures went around the world, suffering, refugee camps, all of that. And people responded and governments responded. So I find it troubling when I hear you say there's been nothing like it since. When we know there have been issues since that could have used that response, but haven't got it and you wonder whether it's partly because, you know, media and television especially doesn't cover these stories the way they used to because of budgets, because of

insurance, because of a lot of different excuses that they come up with and dropping ratings, all of that. Where do you fit all this together? What do you say about the kind of state of the media in terms of, big international coverage. I mean, there's a lot of great journals still out there. But in terms of the kind of coverage, there's nothing that kind of equals that kind of coverage.

Well, first of all, in 1984, a lot of things seem new. I mean, we were still kind of early in the videotape era. The videotape always seemed more immediate than filmed in. We were satellite. We were able to feed virtually same day from Africa. So it was an immediacy. But you didn't have then the extraordinary vortex, a spinning vortex, of endless fragmentation of the media, endless stories,

crisis after crisis after crisis. My big worry now, with all the good technology in the world, even always getting better, we're just fragmenting everything so that people get two days of this story, then they go on and they get three days of the next story. And it is so fragmented. There's no there there. There's no factor bringing it all together, except in extremely rare cases.

One can think of a few that are going on now. But more people were being stunned by the shock of video out there than they would certainly would be now when they've seen so much more so often. So to the point where I think there's a kind of exhaustion almost with as I keep going back to that term, vortex. I wanted to use it in the title of my book, but the editor said, you're going to be crazy now. I didn't. But it's, you know, the spinning, spinning, spinning,

24-7 over and over again, whose stuff is wearing on the reporters in the field who don't get as much time as we had at that period, the ability to reflect, which they don't get today nearly as much as we had back then. And so you had a combination of a shock factor or people seeing something they really hadn't witnessed before. And now the endless drumbeat of things over and over again

that are also horrible to watch, but they become numbing after a while. I think that's part of it. You're quite right. The reporters out there today are absolutely fabulous. They'd be good at any period of journalistic history. But boy, they have a tough road, given all the factors we just talked about. Well, they should read your book

because it will remind them and hopefully it will remind their managers and those who control the purse strings that there is a way of doing things and you and some others of your generation captured that way. The book is called On the Ground

My Life is a Foreign Correspondent by Brian Stewart. Good luck whether Brian know it's going to do well. Cheers. Thanks a lot, Peter. We appreciate it. So there you go. Brian Stewart, our first guest today on this kind of special Wednesday, it's not an encore edition of the bridge, it's the real deal.

This is a new one, so I hope you're enjoying it. Once again, Brian's book is called On the Ground. My Life is a Foreign Correspondent. And you can find it, well, you can find it in any good bookstore out there. So, and you can, yes, you can get it online as well. well. But it is well worth the read. And I know a lot of you are big fans of Brian because you've been writing saying, you're going to have Brian talk about his new book? Well, there, you just heard it. And we got another author, another first-time author,

coming up on the program. But first, we're going to take this break. And welcome back. You're listening to The Bridge, a special Wednesday, new edition, as we're talking to a couple of authors who just happened to be two friends of mine and former colleagues at different times over the last 20, 30 years of certainly our combined time in journalism. Well, combined time. God, I'm afraid to combine it. We're talking centuries.

Next book. It's called The Golden Daughter. And it's written by somebody who was a producer that I worked with at different times in my career. And I think Brian did as well. Helena St. James is her name. She's written a book called The Golden Daughter. Let me read you a couple of lines, not from the book, but from the publicity surrounding it. Secret wartime letters, a volatile love triangle, an unmarked grave, a noble heritage.

Now, if that doesn't have you interested, I'm not sure what would. Sorting through her late mother's possessions, Helena St. James found a secret, stash of letters. They told how her mother, Maria, was abducted as a teenager in Ukraine by Nazis and sent to Germany as a slave. After the war, Maria found herself pregnant in a displaced person's camp. She married the father, an older man from a noble Polish family. But her life changed when her husband introduced his friend, a young Polish freedom fighter. In Canada, the younger man betrayed his friend and ran off with Maria and Helena. So a lot of this she had no idea of until she found that stash of letters.

And she'll explain to you why that stash of letters led to this book, The Golden Daughter. So here we go. Helena St. James, right here on the bridge. Helena, I, you know, whenever I interview an author, I'd like to not tell the whole story of the book. Having been in that position myself, you end up, you know, people say, hey, why do I need to buy the book? I've heard it all. So I'm not going to do that kind of interview. I want to talk more about sort of how you got to the spot you were in to start writing.

I want to try and understand how this path began. What was it that made you think, I've got to write this story? Well, I didn't want to write this story. That was the first thought that I had. When my mother died, she left me, or rather I found, 55 letters, all in Russian and Polish. and I had a really traumatic mother-daughter relationship. My mother was a narcissist, and she was a drama queen. So when I found these letters, I had a choice to make.

Do I throw them out? Do I keep them? And I was afraid if I kept them, I'd be sucked into one of Mama's traumas from the grave even. So I decided to keep the letters. and I decided after a year this was not a long a short process I decided after a year okay what's in the letters my journalistic you know senses were saying like curiosity what's in those letters so I got them translated and even after I got them translated I still couldn't read them I just I didn't want to go there I just read bits and

pieces. And the translator said, oh, my God, this story. And my husband, Neil, read it. He said, oh, my God, the story. And then finally, when she was visiting here, her friend Anna Maria Tramonte, was sitting on the couch, leafing through a binder of the letters. And she said, oh, my God, Helena, this is an amazing story. You have to write it. And I think deep, deep down, Peter, I didn't feel that I could write it. I didn't feel confident, which is stupid. I didn't feel, I couldn't write the book. So Anna Maria was the one that really saw the story.

She said, look, she said, this spans generations. It's a story that has to be told. And so I started writing it. And there is a saying when you write a book, and I don't know if you encountered this when you wrote your books, but there's a saying that there's always the first draft. That's where you need good editors. Oh, God.

Yes. And so there was that first draft. but I at 74 years of age I'm not 74 now I'm much older at 74 years of age came to the attention and this is a story unto itself involving a Canadian filmmaker

in Tel Aviv whom I met on a German army base in Batrenhal okay so he introduces me to his daughter a goddaughter, rather. She lives in Vancouver. I secure a Zoom call with her, and she says, and we get together, and she's very abrupt. And she said, well, what do you want for me? I said, well, I'm looking for agents. You know, I've got nine chapters of a book written. And she said, first of all, I don't do World War II stories.

I don't edit World War II stories. And I said, well, I don't write books about my mother. So that's how we started. And she said, okay, tell me your story. Like, I didn't really know who she was. All I knew is she was Bernard's goddaughter. And she did something in publishing. All I wanted was give me the name of an agent, give me the name of somebody.

So we talked. and we talked for an hour, and I showed her the letters. I talked, you know, I wasn't selling anyone. I was just talking about my experiences. And literally, after about an hour of me babbling on, she looked at me, this is Zoom, she looked at me, she said, you know, I think I want you for myself. And I would, take me, take me, I'm yours.

Well, it was smart of both of you, smart of you to write it and smart of her to help shepherd it to the conclusion that's left it already as a bestseller. Let me just go back a little bit before that day you found the letters. Did you suspect at all the kind of background that your family had through your mother? Were there moments that you thought, there's got to be more to our story? There's something I'm not being told or I don't know. Did you suspect that? I did. I did.

And, of course, as a teen, as a young woman, and growing into my 40s and 50s, Peter, I knew it all. I knew everything. So I didn't care. I don't care what she had. I didn't, you know, like, Mama was a drama queen. But every once in a while, she would tell a story. And she told maybe just two stories. And whenever she did, as a teenager, I kept rolling my eyes saying,

oh, my God, there goes Mama again, telling the story of being bombed in Schoenford. Like, where the hell is Schoenford and why were they bombing it? And it wasn't until, I'll tell you one little incident, in Nova Scotia, this is how small the world is. My husband and I are in Nova Scotia. We have a bonfire because we're in the country. We're able to have a bonfire. We invite the neighbors over their way.

Their parents come with the grandchildren. Grandkids are running around the bonfire. My parents are here. mama and my stepfather Neil and I and Russ and Verna and the kids so everyone is talking but somewhere in the corner of the bonfire on two lawn chairs Russ and Verna are like their eye to eye head they're they're just talking intensely and after a while mama gets up Russell gets up and she comes running over to us and says oh my God God, he bombed me. He bombed me. Unbelievable. That was Mama's phrase. Unbelievable. He bombed me.

And Russell Kim comes up behind her. He's kind of like a gentleman and older gentleman, Nova Scotia man. He said, well, you know, I guess that's true. I did. Technically bombed her because I put the bombs on the planes in England that flew over Schweinfurt. And that was the first time I got an inkling that maybe what she was saying, you know, was true. But I still didn't pay attention. I still didn't pay attention. And there was another story that she told, and I still didn't pay attention. She always said, I'm a survivor.

I'm a survivor. And I always rolled my eyes and said, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, sure, sure. and when I had the letters, when I read the letters, rather, I truly found out what a survivor my mom was, my mother was. And I'll tell you what happened after that, Peter, the guilt. Unbelievable guilt. I was not a good daughter. Was I a good daughter?

How I could have helped her so much more if I had known, if I had known. And then the anger, Mama, why didn't you tell me? Why? It was, you know, drove me into therapy. And fortunately, I had survival skills in Buddhism. There's a big Buddhist community here in Nova Scotia. So I meditated. I talked to friends and therapists, therapist, therapist, you know,

because I felt so guilty when I learned the full story. You know, we know each other because we both sort of came out of the same journalism stream. We worked together in some bureaus and in places overseas. We, you know, I got a chance to see what a great journalist you were. And you, you know, you've already mentioned that you needed to draw upon some of those journalism skills to to tell this story. What was the most important thing you were able to draw upon from your own background in journalism

to be able to tell the story? Once you'd found the data that you were going to use, but then it became, you know, obviously having to do interviews, having to write, all of these things. What was the most important element of your journalistic background? that you used to tell the story? Research. I researched, pardon me, the shot of it.

And I went to Germany. And I followed in Mama's footsteps. And every step of the way, I had set up appointments and interviews with historians, archivists, wherever. So I went to all of these places that Mama was in. I went to the place where I was born. I went to City Hall in Viden, where I was born.

And in my hands, I held my mother's marriage certificate and all the other certificates that had to go with getting married in Germany. I went to Schoenford, where she was bombed. Pardon me? I went to the park across the mine river, across from the four factories that to this day produce ball bearings, because as you know, nothing runs without ball bearings. I went to those,

I went to those factories and I went to the park across the river where my mother's camp used to stand, her barracks where the women were marched three kilometers into the factory to stand at the station

making ball bearings and my guide was a gentleman from an organization called pardon me It's the group against forgetting. It's something like that. But they have a memorial in this park to all the slave workers,

not just to Mama, to all the people that have worked in those factories. So along in this park, there were memorial boards, and he would stop and he would read the memorial boards because they were all in German. And one of the boards where my mother's camp stood, pardon me he talked about how the bombs fell and the slave workers like my mother had no shelter there were bomb shelters but the bomb shelters were for the Nazis and in German citizens so they they had to with their hands dig shallow pits in the grave in the earth peter they had to did shallow pits

and they get in them and they cowered in them hoping please God don't bomb me today and as my friend Werner read he said and the river ran red with blood

there were body parts everywhere and Mama survived that and after each bombing they got out of their pits and they were sent to work to clean up the debris that the

allied forces had left. And then they went back to work. Relentless. And you can imagine as the war got, well, as the war progressed against the Nazis, as the Germans were losing, you know, they became more desperate to get more ballberries, to get more people working. So they just didn't care. I know, I know the horrific, horrific story of the Holocaust victims, but I'll tell you, The slave workers of Germany were just one tiny step above them. They weren't shot. You know, they were worked to death. They had their form of death marches.

You know, I hadn't thought I was going to say this, but I'll say it now. You know, most of those bombing rains on Schoenford were done by the Americans daylight bombing. And, you know, they were at great cost. Obviously, to those on the ground, but also to the Americans, because daylight bombing was something that really hadn't been tried. But before that, there was nighttime bombing. My father was in the REF. My father was in bomber command. My father flew Lancaster's.

He was navigator on Lancaster's. And when I go through his logbook, there are raids on Shwineford. Oh, my God. Here are all these years. Yeah. Here are all these years later. you and I are talking to each other from a very different perspective on that. So it's quite something.

Last question. Is this book going to get published there? Would it be published in Germany? Would it be published in Ukraine? What do you think? I hope so. I hope so. But I don't know because I know nothing about publishing.

All I know is that I've been published by a reputable a Canadian publisher, the House of a Nancy Press, and they are the largest independent Canadian publisher. They've been around for like 70 years. There's a process that they go through where they say, okay, this book, you know, would you like to buy this book? And they sell it to European publishers, but they decide.

My family, which is another story we don't have time for, like through all of this, I discovered I had a family. I discovered my family is noble. And I mean, oh my God, this is such a story. But the family in Poland, which is huge, wants the book in Polish. You know, people in Germany should read the book. You know, all the people I spoke to there, but it's not up to me. So, you know, fingers crossed that it will get a wider audience. Because I mean, the one thing about the, certainly certain segments of German society, certainly more than there were, you know, a couple of dozen years ago, are much more accepting of telling these stories.

And so I hope your publisher talks to publishers there because I'm sure it would be fascinating. to be read there as well. Helena, it's great to talk to you again. It's been a few years since we've chatted, but this is great. And I wish you so much success on the book, and I'm glad that it's already a bestseller. And I will only keep climbing up the charts, I hope. Thank you.

Thank you. Helena, St. James. That is the name of the author, and the book's title is called The Gold and the Book's title is called The Golden Daughter. And it's a remarkable book about courage and survival and

you got time, you should read it. Okay, well, that's our, you know, kind of special show for this week on a Wednesday, which is normally reserved for encore auditions, and there will be more on-core additions to come through Wednesdays of this year.

but occasionally we'll do something like this and this was special to be able to talk to Brian Stewart about his book and Alina about her book a couple reminders about the days ahead tomorrow is our your turn program and along with the random ranter

the question for this week I'm looking forward to getting those answers there's been quite a few already are you worried about the long-term future of the United States. That is our question for this week. 75 words or fewer. You don't have much time.

6 p.m. Eastern Time tonight to get your answer in. Include your name and the location. And you can write to the Mansbridge Podcast at gmail.com. The Mansbridge Podcast at gmail.com. That's tomorrow's program. and Friday, of course, is a good talk with Shantelle-A-Bear and Bruce Anderson will be back this week. Thanks so much for this one. Thanks for listening.

And we'll talk to you again in a little less than 24 hours.