a montreal writer pieces together her parents’ wartime past in nazi-occupied poland

only after her parents were both gone, only after immersing herself in archives and historical records to piece together their stories, did montrealer alice switocz goldbloom at last have a sense of what they had endured in nazi-occupied poland during the second world war — and of why they never talked about it beyond in broad strokes and vague terms.“as i unearthed what lay beneath my parents’ decades of silence, their story emerged as a window into the experiences of countless others in poland,” she writes in family secrets: a daughter’s search for her parents’ hidden war (pottersfield press, 2026, 164 pp).she calls her memoir “part detective story, part ungrateful-immigrants’-daughter-finally-gets-it memoir, part bridge between academic history and lived experience that brings less accessible scholarly research to life through the eyes of two people.”and she does a masterful job of weaving her parents’ stories with historical narrative. “i wanted the book to be balanced between an intimate family memoir and the history," she said.edward switocz and maria walęsa met in eindhoven, holland, in 1947, as displaced persons (dps) trying to rebuild lives shattered by the war. maria came to canada in 1951 as a domestic in an immigration program for dps; edward followed and secured work in the southwestern ontario city of sarnia, where they were married in early may 1952 in the only catholic church in town.alice, the eldest of the couple’s three daughters, was “the kid embarrassed by her recess snacks and clothes, the teenager ashamed of her immigrant parents’ accents, the indifferent adult who didn’t ask questions that mattered.”until she did.

photo courtesy of alice switocz goldbloom /

it was her father who kick-started things, a decade or so ago. he had moved to a long-term care facility in toronto from the retirement residence in sarnia in which he had lived since a few years following his wife’s death in 2005. he was in his mid-90s, physically frail but intellectually sharp.every two or three weeks, switocz goldbloom would travel from montreal for the day to visit. she started to ask questions about his past — “and it snowballed,” she recalled.from one visit to the next, “i would just let the conversation go where it went — and so we jumped around, decades sometimes.” on the train ride home, she’d write down what she remembered in a hilroy notebook.they were long conversations — two or three or four hours — and they cracked open memories for her father as he shared fragments of his experience in wartime poland. eventually, after his death in 2019, these fragments would lead her to the library and beyond to research her parents’ — and poland’s — war history in earnest.beyond “a few scattered facts,” switocz goldbloom knew little of her parents’ past. she knew her father had lived with his family in warsaw’s mirowski square, hard by the walls of poland’s largest jewish ghetto. the deportations from the ghetto, erected in 1940, to death camps began in 1942.she knew he had fought with the polish home army, one of europe’s largest resistance forces, in the 1944 warsaw uprising against the german occupation. nearly 200,000 polish civilians and at least 16,000 home army fighters died in the 63-day uprising; 11,000 resistance fighters, including her father, were sent to prisoner-of-war camps.her paternal grandparents were transported from warsaw to concentration camps in germany — her grandmother to ravensbrück, her grandfather to gross-rosen — and were murdered there. before learning this from her father, “i had always assumed they died in the warsaw uprising,” she said.before the german invasion of 1939, there were 3.3 million jews in poland; 90 per cent were murdered during the holocaust, mostly in the ghettos and the six death camps in nazi-occupied poland, including treblinka, majdanek and auschwitz-birkenau.“it is history’s most-documented genocide, and rightfully so,” writes switocz goldbloom.but 2.7 million non-jewish polish civilians were also murdered by the nazis, according to the polish institute of national remembrance. and those deaths “were mourned privately by their families — but relegated to the margins of history.”with poland under communist rule between 1945 and 1989, a great deal of information was suppressed — and a lack of objective accounts “played a major role in why a more complete picture of what happened in poland remains largely unknown in the west,” writes switocz goldbloom.“with polish voices silenced by their own government, the jewish experience became the primary lens through which the west understood wartime poland.”in seeing history through her parents’ eyes, “my intention is not to diminish other stories or the bigger picture," she writes. "evil does come in degrees, but it is rarely useful to quantify or compare it. simply put, no polish citizen escaped the crimes of the nazi regime during the second world war.”little as she knew of her father’s wartime experiences, she knew less of her mother’s. she knew she had worked in germany, although “nobody used the term ‘forced labour’ when we were growing up,” switocz goldbloom said.her mother was 20 when she was taken in june 1940 from home in a village in what was western poland after its annexation in 1939 by germany and transported to a work crew in bavaria to clear wooded land for an iron and steelworks company. “maria was one of almost two million polish citizens forced to work for hitler’s war machine,” switocz goldbloom writes.forced labour was a central component of the crimes against humanity and war crimes prosecuted during the nuremberg trials after the second world war, but the topic then remained dormant for decades, switocz goldbloom explains. it gained traction among scholars with a seminal work on nazi-era forced labour by ulrich herbert, a leading german historian; published in german in 1985, it was translated into english in 1997. and in 2000, stuart eizenstat, deputy secretary of the u.s. treasury department during the clinton administration, was instrumental in negotiating a settlement with the german government and industry for compensation for surviving forced labourers like switocz goldbloom's mother.her mother never talked about her experience. “her silence was the inheritance my mother left me,” she writes. a doting mother, “she took care of us. she cooked. she kept the house immaculate. she cared so much. and yet there was something that was so tightly kept, at some level” — as if "she was scared it could all change on a dime.”switocz goldbloom, who married into a montreal jewish family, dedicates her book to her daughter and son, now in their early 30s. adopted from poland as infants, they grew up “steeped in the rich legacy of their paternal grandparents, pillars of the jewish community,” she writes. they saw their maternal grandparents less and had little exposure to their polish heritage.“i want my children to know they descend from a nation that resisted tyranny with everything it had,” she said. “i want them to understand that their polish heritage holds both enormous suffering and extraordinary resilience. that is not a small thing to know.“this book is my attempt to give them what i once tried so hard to leave behind — their history, their inheritance, their roots.”sschwartz@postmedia.com