Wanda’s War
An Untold Story of Nazi Europe, Forced Labour, and a Canadian Immigration Scandal
By Marsha Faubert
Published by Goose Lane | Available February 21, 2023
Order Wanda’s War at Amazon, Indigo, on the Goose Lane website, or at your favourite independent bookseller.
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 was stateless. In the post-war shifting of borders, the land where she grew up was no longer part of Poland, but was annexed to Soviet Belarus.
Wanda's future husband, Kazimierz (Casey) Surdykowski, grew up in the same region, less than one hundred kilometres from Wanda's home village. His odyssey followed a different route: deported to forced labour in the Soviet Union in 1940, he joined the Polish Second Army on his release, and fought in Italy. Unwilling to live in then Soviet-occupied Poland, Wanda and Casey joined one million other Europeans who could not be repatriated after the war.
Wanda became one of 100 young Polish women brought to Canada in 1947 to address a labour shortage at a Québec textile mill. But rather than arriving at 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 and her husband remained silent about their wartime experiences. Only after their deaths did their daughter-in-law assemble the pieces of their lives in Poland, the Soviet Union, 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.
More than 13 million Europeans were displaced and sent to forced labour camps during the Second World War.
Between 1947 and 1951, Canada admitted more than 160,000 displaced persons, largely to assist with its burgeoning manufacturing sector.
Identity Card, Corps Commemorative Badge, Kazimierz Surdykowski
D.P. Identification Card, Wanda Gizmunt
“Silence is an elusive topic, as Marsha Faubert discovers. Why did two Polish post-war refugees, Wanda, a slave labourer in Nazi Germany, and Casey, who spent his war first in a Soviet gulag and then fighting in the Polish army, never talk about their experiences? Why did their children show no interest? The answers to these questions proved elusive too. This book should be a conversation starter.”
— IRENE TOMASZEWSKI, editor and translator of Inside a Gestapo Prison
“A timeless story of resilience and survival in the face of unimaginable hardship and unspeakable evil. Armed with a cache of faded photographs and a few clues, Faubert has painstakingly unearthed a lost family history that transports readers from the labour camps of Siberia and Nazi Germany to a new life built in Canada after the Second World War. A masterclass in how to reconstruct the past and a remarkable, haunting book.”
— DEAN JOBB, author of The Acadian Saga
“Piecing together the previously shrouded story of her Polish immigrant in-laws’ past, the often-pained story of ordinary people denied ordinary lives, Marsha Faubert has created a thoroughly researched, artfully written, and deeply moving work that is almost impossible to put down.”
— HAROLD TROPER, co-author of None Is Too Many
“Wanda’s War is a passionate retelling of the effort to piece together the silence around a family story. By uncovering the heart-wrenching drama of her husband’s parents, Polish survivors during the second World War, Faubert pays tribute to their courage and all they endured: gulags, forced labor, relocation camps, enlistment, and the little-known shameful story of Polish immigration to Canada. With so many refugees facing similar hardships today, Wanda’s War does humanity a service by shedding light on past periods of turmoil and dislocation. Marsha Faubert’s sensitive investigation into the lives of her in-laws, and the past that must not be forgotten, is a powerful and moving story.”
— GWEN STRAUSS, author of The Nine: The True Story of a Band of Women Who Survived the Worst of Nazi Germany
In 1950, two young immigrants who grew up not far from each other in a vanished part of Poland met at a dance hall in Kitchener, Ontario. In the war that had just ended, they had each been taken forcibly from their homes and deported to work in the enemy’s labour camps, one to the Soviet Union, the other to Nazi Germany, beginning an odyssey that finally concluded in that small city in southern Ontario. They were Wanda Gizmunt and Casey Surdykowski, the parents of my husband, George.
When I met them, their past in an eastern European country was noticeable in the furnishings of their home, the food they ate, and their accented English, but otherwise, they lived much like any other Canadian family of the era. Although the bare facts hinted at a traumatic past, the subject wasn’t discussed in his family, or easily raised by an outsider like me. It wasn’t until after their deaths — first Casey’s, then Wanda’s seventeen years later — that I began to consider what they had actually endured during the war. With the pressures of my career behind me, I had the time to wonder at the price they had paid to survive, and then to leave their homes behind to emigrate and live as Canadians.
The discovery of some old photographs and mementoes while we were cleaning out the family home after Wanda’s funeral prompted my search for answers to these questions. Before long I was immersing myself in archives and historical works, and scouring obscure corners of the internet for crumbs of information shared by families of Polish war survivors. As I went on, I realized that in many ways, Wanda and Casey’s stories were proxies for millions of European civilians whose lives were disrupted by the war in ways that are little known today. And, as members of the first groups admitted into Canada after the war, their stories also illuminated the evolving values and attitudes towards newcomers of a country at a turning point in its history.
from Wanda’s War by Marsha Faubert
Wanda Gizmunt, age 18, at a displaced persons camp in Fulda, January 1946.
Kazimierz (Casey) Surdykowski, 12th Podolski Lancers, Polish II Corps.