Wanda's War by Marsha Faubert

Author:Marsha Faubert
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781773102764
Publisher: Goose Lane Editions
Published: 2022-12-21T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 10

One Hundred Girls and a Scandal

“From slave labour to slave labour!” In the UNRRA area headquarters office in Aschaffenburg, Germany, Kathryn Hulme banged on the switchboard and shouted in disgust. A businessman and politician from Quebec was waiting for her in her office, a “dapper little man with a lisp and a limp and a great big briefcase in his hands,” who wanted to visit several camps near Frankfurt in search of young women to work in his spinning mill in Canada. Certain that headquarters would never allow him access, she telephoned her director to confirm that she should turn the man away.

Hulme had been assistant director of the camp at Wildflecken during Wanda’s residence. She knew better than most the circumstances that brought thousands of Poles to Germany—and the reasons they refused to return to Poland. She pulled out the UNRRA directive that prohibited unauthorized visits from emigration officials to displaced persons camps, no doubt written with this situation in mind. She couldn’t believe that UNRRA would agree to the separation of the young women from their families, after so much effort had gone into reuniting them. If UNRRA headquarters was going to allow what Hulme called “industrial wolves” like Ludger Dionne to travel through the camps and “scoop their rivals on cheap labour,” she wanted no part of it.1

But Dionne had made the right connections once he arrived in Europe, and UNRRA brass didn’t share Hulme’s objections. The Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees (IGCR) agreed to work with him, and it took administrative control of the process, obtaining for Dionne access to the camps that he would not otherwise have been permitted to enter. Once the barriers were removed, Dionne toured several camps with a Polish American chaplain, where he made an initial selection of 130 young women who would be screened at the UNRRA emigrant assembly centre at Sachsenhausen, Frankfurt.

Wanda first met Dionne at Wildflecken and was one of the lucky few who met with his approval and made it through the first round of vetting. In Frankfurt, the screening and registration team—three Polish staff members of a Catholic agency that worked with the IGCR, five members of the Canadian immigration team, and two Americans, including social worker Jessamine Fenner—were on hand to make sure the women were physically and mentally fit and qualified to enter Canada. Dionne and the Canadian consul and vice-consul for Germany watched over the entire process.

In the meantime, Dionne was frantically making arrangements for chartered flights to transport the women to Canada. Too impatient to wait for ships sailing to Canada with room enough for his workers, he spent over $40,000 on the flights, more than half a million dollars in 2022 Canadian currency. The question of who was ultimately responsible for the cost of the flights would linger over Dionne as news of the immigrant millworkers spread, but Dionne paid for it up front, leaving one to wonder: if the mill was that profitable, why not just pay his workers better

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