The Golden Daughter is a rare, exhaustively researched book that took shape after author Halina St. James found a stash of 55 letters following her mother’s death. The correspondence, in Russian, revealed how her Ukrainian mother had been abducted by Germans when she was 17. St. James, a former CBC National News producer living in Nova Scotia, writes, “I was stunned. The letters told of a time when the world went mad.”
The subsequent memoir chronicles a daughter’s astonishing discovery of her mother’s traumatic past as a slave worker in Nazi Germany, her involvement in a turbulent love triangle, and other family secrets. The fast-paced narrative embroils readers in a period fraught with the atrocities Nazis thrust upon Eastern Europeans. As St. James excavates the early life of her beautiful, emotionally distant mother, who concealed the extreme hardship she survived, tumultuous emotions surface.
St. James has crafted a riveting story that became deeply personal, yielding a moving account of love and forgiveness.
I remember meeting St. James’s “mama” in the early 1990s. I was invited to dinner at Halina’s Tantallon home. There was no trace of a traumatic past in the wise 70-year-old woman seated next to me as we chatted amiably. I left feeling deep respect for a woman I barely knew, and realized later I had encountered someone very special.
Published by House of Ansazi Press, 2025.