My Mother Was Freed by US Forces. Now Soldiers Are Being Deployed to American Cities
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 for Germany’s factories and farms. Hitler denigrated and dehumanized his targets. “Untermensch”—subhuman—was how he viewed my mother and people like her from Eastern Europe.
As Hitler saw it, they may have been subhuman, but they were also young and fit and could still work.
In Germany, my mother and the others were taken to a processing camp. Ordered to strip, they were poked and prodded by medical staff and deloused. All in front of other abductees, male and female, and the Nazi guards.
Once pronounced “clean,” she was sent to Wurzburg, a historic city in the Bavarian region of Germany. She worked for several months as a housemaid for a Dr. Horst Schröter and his wife.
Housework was an easy entry into slavery for my mother, but that was about to change. Before 1943 was over, she was sent to Schweinfurt, just over forty kilometres from Wurzburg, to work twelve-hour shifts making ball bearings for German tanks, trucks, planes, and ships. My mother and the others were systematically starved, abused, and humiliated by the Nazis. They were bombed repeatedly by the Allies. She lived on a watery soup of potato peelings and dug holes in the earth with her bare hands to protect herself from bombs.
In April 1945, she and the other surviving forced labourers crept from the ruins of the city and saw, marching toward them, American soldiers, members of the storied 42nd Infantry “Rainbow” Division.
The Rainbow Division had been created from twenty-seven National Guard units in the mobilization rush before World War I. In the words of Colonel, later General, Douglas MacArthur, the 42nd Division stretches like a rainbow from one end of America to the other. A symbol of a nation coming together to fight so strangers could live free of tyranny.
I couldn’t help but think of those young American soldiers as I watched United States president Donald Trump order their successors to take arms and march once more into war zones. But his war zones were American cities—Chicago, Los Angeles, Memphis, Portland, and Washington, DC. He has targeted what he calls the enemy within: aliens, rapists, murderers, drug lords, vermin, radical left lunatics, and democratic politicians.
Trump ordered the National Guard into US cities to curb protests over the heavy-handed activities of Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials. Trump had ramped up raids by ICE, fulfilling his “Mass Deportation Now” slogan during his election campaign.
But when ICE agents raided an apartment building in Chicago, guns drawn, and detained dozens of residents, four of which were children born in the US, protestors took to the streets.
There were protests, too, when a forty-four-year-old father living in Alabama was deported by ICE to Laos, despite a judge ordering that he could stay in America as he presented what the judge said was “a substantial claim” of US citizenship.
When we demean and diminish people—labelling them as subhuman, as in my mother’s case, or aliens and vermin, as in Trump’s case—when we brutalize them with our words and our deeds, when we deny them due process, we sow seeds of pain and grief that gnaw away at them and their offspring for years.
My mother survived those brutal war years in Germany. She immigrated to Canada, but she carried emotional wounds for the rest of her life. Her relationships foundered. Her friendships soured. She was never happy.
For some, it’s a pain so deep it’s passed from generation to generation. I hadn’t heard of intergenerational trauma until I started writing a book about my mother, The Golden Daughter. Now I’m doing therapy for it.
In 1944, when the GIs of the Rainbow Division were sent to Europe, they likely had a message from then US president Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He wished them well in their “fight to end conquest, their fight to liberate.”
Today we might argue that it is America that needs liberating. It was Roosevelt who warned that democracy was not safe if people tolerated the growth of individual or group power beyond that of the democratic state itself.
“Fascism,” he said, is “ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power.” It has no place in a democratic country.
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