the traitor’s daughter: captured by nazis, pursued by the kgb, my mother’s odyssey to freedom from her secret past

The masterful narration of a daughter’s decades-long quest to understand her extraordinary mother, who was born in Lenin’s Soviet Union, served as a combat soldier in the Red Army, and endured three years of Nazi captivity--but never revealed her darkest secrets.

As a child, Roxana Spicer would sometimes wake to the sound of the Red Army choir. She would tip-toe downstairs to find her mother, cigarette in one hand and Black Russian in the other, singing along. Roxana would keep her company, and wonder....

Everyone in their village knew Agnes Spicer was Russian, that she had been a captive of the Nazis. And that was all they knew, because Agnes kept her secrets close: how she managed to escape Germany, what the tattoo on her arm meant, even her real name.

Discovering the truth about her beloved, charismatic, volatile mother became Roxana’s obsession. Throughout her career as a journalist and documentarian, between investigations across Canada and around the world, she always went home to ask her mother more questions, often while filming.

Roxana also took every chance to visit the few places that she did know played a role in her mother’s story: Bad Salzuflen, Germany, home to POW slave labourers during the war; notorious concentration camps; and Russia. Under Gorbachev, Yeltsin, and the early years of Putin, she was able to find people, places, and documents that are now--perhaps forever--lost again.

The Traitor’s Daughter is intimate and exhaustively researched, vividly conversational, and shot through with Agnes Spicer’s irrepressible, fiery personality. It is a true labour of love as well as a triumph of blending personal biography with sweeping history.

ROXANA SPICER grew up in Netherhill, Saskatchewan, population 80. As a CBC investigative journalist, her award-winning work across Canada led to real change. She has pursued stories in remotest Ecuador, the Arabian Desert, and the North Sea; she has reported from a high-tech ocean dive ship, a nomadic Kyrgyz yurt, and Perm-36, the last standing gulag in Putin’s Russia. The most elusive interview subject over a forty-year career her own mother. Roxana lives in Toronto.