While Dragging Our Hearts Behind Us
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Wanda's War
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Wanda's War
An Untold Story of Nazi Europe, Forced Labour, and a Canadian Immigration Scandal
Sale price
£14.99
Regular price
£19.99
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Finalist, Rakuten Kobo Emerging Writer Prize (Non-Fiction)
What does it mean to be exiled? For the landmarks of your past to disappear?
In 1943, Wanda Gizmunt was ripped from her family home in Poland and deported to a forced labour camp in Nazi Germany. At the end of the war, she became one of millions of displaced Europeans awaiting resettlement.
Unwilling to return to then-Soviet-occupied Poland, Wanda became one of 100 young Polish women brought to Canada in 1947 to address a labour shortage at a Quebec textile mill. But rather than arriving to long-awaited freedom, the women found themselves captives to their Canadian employer. Their treatment eventually became a national controversy, prompting scrutiny of Canada’s utilitarian immigration policy.
Wanda seized the opportunity to leave the mill in the midst of a strike in 1948. She never looked back, but she remained silent about her wartime experience. Only after her death did her daughter-in-law assemble the pieces of Wanda’s life in Poland, Nazi Germany, and finally, Canada. In this masterful account of a hidden episode of history, Faubert chronicles the tragedy of exile and the meaning of silence for those whose traumas were never fully recognized.
Marsha Faubert is a Toronto-based lawyer with a lengthy history of public service in the administrative justice system in Ontario. She has worked as a litigator, an arbitrator, an adjudicator of appeals in workplace injury and disease claims, and as the director of a provincial tribunal. Wanda’s War is her first book.
- ISBN-13
- 9781773102757
- Publisher
- Goose Lane Editions
- Imprint
- Goose Lane Editions
- Publication date
- 21 February 2023
- Format
- Paperback
- Pages
- 256
- Dimensions
- 229 x 152 mm
- Language
- English
