On a February morning, seventeen-year-old Maria Brik kissed her mother goodbye and set off for school. She never saw her home—or her homeland, Ukraine—again.

She recalled: “We were herded between two rows of armed soldiers and ordered on to open-backed trucks. We were taken to a camp full of other children and their teachers, surrounded by barbed wire.”

Maria Brik was my mother, and the year was 1943. When her parents heard their daughter had been snatched by one of Adolf Hitler’s armed squads, they rushed to the holding camp in a vain attempt to save her. Later, my grandfather would write, “I always have before my eyes the vision of how you turned up behind the barbed wire with a chunk of black bread, weeping bitterly.”

The next day, armed squads stuffed my mother and the other dirty and frightened detainees into cattle cars and dispatched them to Germany to work as slaves.

My mother never talked much about those days. I learned details of her ordeal only after her death, when I found a bundle of letters she’d hung on to for eighty years. Through these letters, and through researching and writing her story, I came to realize the deep and lasting impact of the pain caused when individuals are taken from their families, stripped of their dignity, and dispatched to foreign lands.

My mother was one of millions of men, women, and children from across Europe who were unwitting victims of Hitler’s strategy to find free labour........

© The Walrus