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Reviews of The Golden Daughter
"Captivated my imagination... seized my heart and soul"
"From the opening page, The Golden Daughter captivated my imagination and then seized my heart and soul. Although the characters in this tragic love triangle are crafted from personal and historical fragments, they are vivid, deeply human, and unforgettable. And Halina St James's reflections at the end allow you to accompany her on a profound journey of healing and hope. This is a rare and precious gift of a book."
- Nancy Regan, author of From Showing Off to Showing Up
"A story of survival, but then so much more"
"Halina St James uncovers through exhaustive research the painful story of Maria, her Ukrainian mother, who was kidnapped into slave labour at the hands of the Nazis. The Golden Daughter is a story first of survival in the face of unmatched brutality, but then so much more. Maria is a heroine, and so is Halina for unearthing her mother's story, not just for herself, but also now, through this remarkable book, for us, so we never forget what happened in the darkest of times and how they cast a shadow on almost everything that followed."
- Peter Mansbridge, broadcaster, journalist, author
"I couldn't stop reading"
"This is a powerful and cathartic story - full of emotion, discovery, and a history few have chosen to share. I couldn't stop reading."
- Anna Maria Tremonti, journalist, podcaster, speaker
"A story of secrets, slavery, anger and betrayal"
"After finding her mother's letters, Halina St James discovered a story of secrets, slavery, anger and betrayal, as saviours became seducers, and vice versa. But, ultimately, The Golden Daughter is a story of survival."
- Wendy Mesley, journalist, podcaster
"A beautifully shared mystery of this age"
"Halina St James's lifelong curiosity and emotional pain drives her to seek a deeper appreciation of the failings of her ancestors, which also leads to thrilling connections only blood provides. The Golden Daughter is a beautifully shared mystery of this age where family secrets crumble because of scientific and information innovation, providing answers to the question: 'Who am I, really?'"
- Kevin Newman, journalist
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Here's part of the conversation when Sari Botton, creator of the Memoir Land Author Questionnaire, talked with Halina about The Golden Daughter.
Q: How do you categorize your book, and why?
Halina: I think of The Golden Daughter as part memoir, part creative nonfiction. My mother rarely talked about her childhood and her wartime experiences, and she would never talk about my birth father, who she left when I was 4 years old....
With my research in Germany and Poland, and in Northern Ontario, I was able to find records of her life, and records of the experiences of other slave workers. Where there were gaps, I was able to construct what I believe is an accurate representation of how my mother would have reacted.
What is not imagined is the historical truth about the war and post-war life in Canada as a Displaced Person (DP) and of course, the impact my mother’s experiences had on me. When I learned the truth of my mother’s life, it explained a lot about mine, and set me on a path towards healing and forgiveness.
Friday, September 26, 2025
Wednesday, September 24, 2025
The Golden Daughter 'a remarkable book' says Peter Mansbridge
I was delighted to share time on Peter Mansbridge's Podcast The Bridge with our former CBC colleague Brian Stewart, talking about our new books.
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Peter was very complimentary. He began my section by saying: "Secret wartime letters, a volatile love triangle, an unmarked grave, and a noble heritage; if that doesn't have your interest I'm not sure what would."
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My conversation with Peter begins 25 minutes in to the podcast, but if you have the time I would urge you to listen also to Brian talking about his book, On The Ground.
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Wednesday, September 3, 2025
A big 'thank you' to Global National reporter Heidi Petracek for her story about how I followed the clues in some old letters and came to write The Golden Daughter. My thanks also to videographer Grey Butler.
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Click the button, or click on the screen grab, to watch Heidi's report.
The Masthead News
'Riveting story yields moving account of love and forgiveness'
By Bette Cahill
The Golden Daughter is a rare, exhaustively researched book that took shape after author Halina St. James found a stash of 55 wartime 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.”
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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.
Bette Cahill (pictured) is an award-winning journalist and author of the bestsellers Butterbox Babies, Butterbox Babies: Baby Sales, Baby Deaths - New Revelations 15 Years Later and A Dangerous Age. She is a friend and former colleague of Halina St. James.
Thursday, August 14
A big thank you to Global Television and host Skye Bryden-Blom for inviting me on to this morning's show to talk about The Golden Daughter.
In the time we had available, we focussed on the discovery of my mother's secret letters - the starting point for the journey that ended with the publication of The Golden Daughter.
A review by freelance writer Cheryl Girard calls The Golden Daughter an "intimate and powerful memoir."
The reviewer concludes: "The Golden Daughter is a story of war, of mankind’s cruelty, betrayal, deception and abandonment. But in the end it is also a heartfelt story of forgiveness, love and new beginnings."​
Here's an extract from an interview Open Book did with Halina:
Open Book:
Is there a question that was central to this project? And if so, did you know the question when you started writing or did it emerge from the process?
Halina St James:
When I began writing, there was no question central to the story. It was simply the story of my mother’s stolen life, her time as a slave worker in Nazi Germany, how she wound up in a love triangle in Canada, and how she survived being a DP first, in
Germany and then in Canada.
But as I wrote, the question emerged. Who was I? I had based my image of myself on someone who deceived me, my mother. She never told me what had happened to her. She never told me about the lies and deception she wove into her life first to survive and to get what she wanted.
As I discovered more about my mother, more about my birth father, whom she never told me about, and more about his family in Poland, the question of my own identity became central to the book.
The Masthead News
March, 2025
EXTRACT: When Halina St James found a handful of old letters after her mother died, they took her on a journey of discovery that changed her life. The letters, in Russian, tell the story of how Halina's mother Mary, then just 17, was abducted from school in Ukraine by Nazi soldiers and sent to work as a slave in Germany during World War 2.
In one letter, Mary's father remembers his last sight of the child he called his golden daughter "behind the barbed wire with a chunk of black bread, weeping bitterly."
Now Halina has written The Golden Daughter: My Mother's Secret Past as a Ukrainian Slave Worker in Nazi Germany, to be published by the House of Anansi in August. Halina delivered the manuscript two weeks ago and the book is already available for pre-order from Indigo and Amazon.
Halina describes the book as a journey into a painful past, but which helped her find understanding, forgiveness and love.
The Masthead News
May, 2023
EXTRACT: I always thought the samovar in my dining room was a family heirloom. It wasn't. It was one of my grandmother’s last gifts, a final effort in 1965 to maintain a link with the daughter she had not seen for more than 20 years.Today, when I look at the samovar, I see much more than a traditional Russian appliance for making tea. I see it as a way for my grandparents to ease a feeling of guilt over the fate of their only child Maria - my mother. In 1943, when she was 17, Maria was snatched from school in Ukraine by Nazi soldiers and sent to work as a slave in Germany. She never saw her parents again.
The Masthead News
January, 2023
EXTRACT: I solved the mystery of what happened to my father. He disappeared from my life when I was four years old. This past fall I learned about the hard-scrabble life he led, and the last years of his life. My discoveries led me to an unmarked grave in a hilltop cemetery in a down-on-its-luck mining town in Northern Ontario.
Main-Post, Wurzburg
July, 2022
EXTRACT: After Maria Brik died in 2018 at the age of 92, her daughter Halina St James found over 60 letters. Written in Russian and Polish by Brik's parents and their friends. The documents tell of the life young Maria Brik, a former labourer in the German Reich. "These letters brought me to Wurzburg," says St James, her voice breaking slightly.
Schweinfurter Tagblatt
July, 2022
EXTRACT: Halina St. James traveled to Germany in May 2022 to visit all the places where she could follow traces of her mother. An employee of the "Initiative against forgetting" led them to the site of the former forced labor camp on the Oberndorfer Wiesen. Although the camp barracks have disappeared, the past became tangible through the erected information boards and verbal explanations.
