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's profile page

ROXANA SPICER grew up in Netherhill, Saskatchewan, population 80. As a documentary filmmaker and former 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 made multiple trips to Russia during the "wild west" years following the fall of the Soviet Union. The most elusive interview subject over her forty-year career remained her own mother. Roxana lives in Toronto.

"A captivating memoir. . . . Spicer unravels her tale at a tantalizing pace, building a kaleidoscopic portrait of her enigmatic mother. . . . 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."
—Publishers Weekly

“In exquisite prose, Spicer dismantles the “personal iron curtain” her Russian mother erected to escape her painful past. Rarely has there been a more powerful account of the 20th century’s horrors, from German slave labor camps to Russian Gulags, filtered so movingly through Spicer’s search for her mother’s story. Both mother and daughter surface from these pages as women of extraordinary courage. This book will make you weep.”
—Rosemary Sullivan, author of Stalin’s Daughter: The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva

"In this searing exposé of her elusive mother’s past life, Roxana Spicer captures the traumas of war and the deep wounds that it can leave on a psyche. Spicer also illustrates the challenges that face a rigorous researcher – the dead-ends, the missing records, the tension between a hard-nosed filmmaker’s questions and a perplexed daughter’s sensitivities. The Traitor’s Daughter is both a compelling story and an important exploration of how one young Russian woman survived the maelstrom of World War Two and its aftermath."
—Charlotte Gray is the author of twelve non-fiction bestsellers, including Passionate Mothers, Powerful Sons: The Lives of Jennie Jerome Churchill and Sara Delano Roosevelt

“A searing and irresistible dive into the chasm of family memory. Roxana Spicer’s story, and that of her mysterious mother, is one of the most compelling — and shattering — accounts I have ever read of World War Two jeopardy, and ultimate survival. The detective work is peerless, the emotional payload, overwhelming. You don’t just read this book, it swallows you whole.”
—Martin Davidson, author of The Perfect Nazi: Discovering My Grandfather's Secret Past and How Hitler Seduced a Generation