As Remembrance Day approaches this year, I set out to write a post linking to books I’ve reviewed about war, but then I realized that I did that last year. And before that, I posted an essay I wrote about the night my father’s plane was shot down over northern France. I wasn’t sure what to focus on—as far as I’m aware, grads of University of King’s College Master of Fine Arts degree in Creative Nonfiction Writing have not produced any new books about WWII. But then I started looking at a book I’ve reviewed already from a different angle.
Wanda’s War: An Untold Story of Nazi Europe, Forced Labour, and a Canadian Immigration Scandal by Marsha Faubert taught me a lot I hadn’t previously known about WWII, specifically what happened to non-Jewish Poles.
It’s well known that the Nazis’ Final Solution singled out Jews and targeted anyone who was genetically Jewish for elimination, resulting in the murder of 6 million Jews, roughly half of whom were Polish Jews. But perhaps because that war, at least in Europe, is primarily known for the Holocaust, some aspects of it tend to be overlooked, at least in my experience. Wanda’s War educated me otherwise.
The Nazis considered Polish people to be a race of “subhumans.” Part of their campaign to eliminate less-deserving peoples from their idea of a good life was to evict 2 to 3 million non-Jewish Poles from their homes and subject them to brutal forced labour. Another 1.8 to 1.9 million non-Jewish Poles were shipped to death camps or shot for being Polish. In all, just short of 5 million Poles, a fifth of Poland’s population, were exterminated. And that’s not counting the Polish children who looked “Aryan” who were kidnapped from their parents, or deliberately orphaned, to be adopted and “Germanized” by German families.
My original review of Wanda’s War focuses primarily on the Nazis’ unadulterated inhumanity toward Polish people. But for many non-Jewish Poles who survived the war, there was another chapter, a period when some people’s greed or narcissism or both allowed them to take advantage of people who were desperate to move on with their lives. So, the second part of Faubert’s book focuses on the immediate post-war period when her mother-in-law was among the tens of thousands of Polish women and men, as well as Ukrainians and others, taken from displaced persons camps and shipped to Canada to do hard labour under harsh conditions for low wages.
Quebec businessman Ludger Dionne was among those who were eager and willing to exploit these people’s vulnerability for their own gain. In the early days after the war, thinking he’d found a way with paying low wages while convincing others he was pursuing a humanitarian mission, Dionne went to Europe and rounded up 100 Polish women to work in his textile mill. Desperate to do anything but return to Poland, and probably terrified of what lay ahead, these women embarked on a new chapter of their lives that turned out to be much less than they expected, hoped for, and deserved.
For the privilege of escaping the horrors they’d experienced, and like thousands of other displaced persons (DPs), the women signed a two-year contract. The “deal” they agreed to amounted to indentured servitude. They worked eight-hour days Monday to Friday and four hours on Saturday. After deductions for room and board, laundry services, and personal necessities, they were often left with less that $5—not enough to save for the better future that was supposed to come after their contracts were up. They could earn a bit more by doing piecework, but they would not be paid for this until their contract concluded.
As a result of a strike by a local union that deplored the women’s working conditions, the women were forced out of work without understanding what was happening or being permitted to speak to union representatives. They only knew they were not earning money, which had been their whole reason for signing the contract with Dionne. Yet he would not allow them to seek other work during the strike. To pay himself for their room and board, he kept the money he had supposedly been saving on their behalf. So, when he released them from before their contracts expired (because there was no money left and he couldn’t afford to keep feeding and housing them, there were no “savings” left for them to receive.
And then there was their “social life.” The women lived in communal dormitories supervised by nuns in a town where they were isolated from the townspeople, judged for driving local wages down, and generally discouraged from living a normal life. Faubert writes:
“Roughly six years earlier [St. Georges] had been a ‘sleepy Quebec village’ with virtually no industry. The clergy had banned dancing (except square dancing) … the women had a curfew of 11:00 p.m. Any socializing was done in the large reception room with glass doors … the nuns closely questioned all visitors … The women resented the supervision and scrutiny. They disliked having their morals a subject of conversation … The nuns and Dionne unduly restricted their contact with local people; one family invited several women to Christmas dinner, but Dionne refused to permit it. A young woman attempted to visit some of the women … but the sisters put her out….
Journalist Mavis Gallant, who later became an important Canadian novelist, wrote an essay about the women for the Montreal Standard. Faubert summarizes:
“Because so many of the women complained about the food … Gallant shared a meal with them.… The meal, which was cold, consisted of ‘meat of an unusual flavor and consistency … two very dry potatoes and a soggy mass of chopped lettuce. Dessert was a gluey blancmange baked over another indefinable substance. There was also tea with no milk or sugar and bread with no butter … It was certainly better than what the women had in the Nazi forced labour camps,’ she wrote, but no better than what they’d been fed in the displaced persons camps.
“After spending some time with the women … Gallant considered what their experience revealed about Canada’s immigration program. Although the women were happy to be in Canada … in some ways Canada was merely an abstraction to [them,] a place to earn money. Their relationship with their home was almost entirely mercenary. This wasn’t surprising; their lives for nearly ten years had left them mistrustful of the world, and they were now ‘interested only in themselves, their own welfare, their own future.’”
Who could blame them?
I’m currently coaching a man who, as a teenager, survived the war in Kosovo. The message he wants his book to convey is that war produces nothing but destruction. As Remembrance Day approaches this year, I am reminded every time I speak to him that war is not only about remembering those who give their lives in battle. It’s also about those caught in the middle who fight simply to survive, and whose war continues long after the battles end.
Reviews of other books about the post-WWII period:
One in Six Million: The Baby by the Roadside and the Man Who Retraced a Holocaust Survivor’s Lost Identity by Amy Fish
How to Share an Egg: A True Story of Hunger, Love, and Plenty by Bonny Reichert
The Nail That Sticks Out: Reflections on the Postwar Japanese Canadian Community by Suzanne Elki Yoko Hartmann
