Tantallon-based author, Halina St James, won the prestigious Evelyn Richardson Award for Non-Fiction on June 1st.
The Nova Scotia Book Awards judges called Halina’s book, The Golden Daughter, “a gripping story… written with unflinching courage.”
The award commemorates the Nova Scotian author who won the 1945 Governor General’s Non-Fiction Award for We Keep A Light.
Halina is glad that her book shed light on a less known World War Two atrocity, when Nazis seized five million men, women, and children in Eastern Europe and forced them to work as slaves in Germany.
Maria, Halina’s mother, was one of them, abducted at 17 from her school in Ukraine. She never saw her parents again.
“My mother was lucky,” says Halina. “She survived the war. But it left her carrying secrets that she took to her grave. I only learned the truth when I found a bundle of letters she had kept hidden for 75 years. Many of the other slaves never talked about their experiences either. So, The Golden Daughter is their story as well as my mother’s.”
Awards ceremony attendees included Nova Scotia Lieutenant Governor Mike Savage and NDP leader Claudia Chender.
Last month, Halina donated to the Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21 (Halifax) a collection of items chronicling her mother’s fleeing of Nazi Germany in search of a new life in a new land.
These included a purse with a secret compartment where Maria hid documents from the Nazis. There were also berth reservations from the ship that brought Maria and four-year-old Halina to Canada.
Halina is a former CBC television producer whose assignments included the Romanian revolution, the Gulf War, and five Olympics.
Story by Neil Everton