Read it (if you haven’t yet!)

Leave a rating or review — even a tiny one
Truly, this is what helps most. A quick click on Amazon or Goodreads takes ten seconds. One cheerful sentence about what stuck with you takes thirty seconds. Both make a real difference for a debut book trying to find its readers.

• Amazon

• Goodreads

Spread the word
Mention it to a friend, your book club, your aunt who loves a good family-history story. Word of mouth is still the best marketing there is — better than anything I could pay for.

Come say hello in person!
I’d love to see you at:

• Atwater Library — Thursday, September 3, ALSO ON ZOOM, so hopefully you can join from anywhere.

• Museum of Immigration at Pier 21 — Sunday, September 13.

Come for the history, stay for the cookies (there are usually cookies).

Or listen to me on CJAD in Montreal this Sunday morning at 8:10, being interviewed by Sue Smith.

Thanks for being part of the village that it takes to sell a book. Every review, every mention, every friendly face in the audience genuinely makes a difference.

Thank God it’s almost Friday! And thanks for letting me shamelessly promote my book.

Alice

PS American readers: the tariff and trade situation makes it expensive to sell Canadian books in the USA published by small presses. For the moment, the book is only available on Kindle.

I have two events coming up that I’d love to see you at, in person or online.

Montreal’s Atwater Library Lunchtime Series (in person and online)

Wednesday, September 3 at 12:30 pm. I’ll be in conversation with Rabbi Lisa Grushcow about Family Secrets: A Daughter’s Search for Her Parents’ Hidden War. This is free, and you can join either in person or online — you’ll get a Zoom link. Register here.

Pier 21 Storyteller Series (Halifax)

Sunday, September 13 at 2:00 pm. For anyone in the Halifax area, this is an in-person event — I’ll be in conversation with Rebecca MacKenzie-Hopkins, Pier 21’s Programming Manager. I would be thrilled to see you there. Details here: https://pier21.ca/events

Hope to see some familiar faces in the room — or on the screen.

You can find out more about the book on my website.

A family walks along the sidewalk of a city street: mother, father, daughter and son. It is a summer day and they are happy, dressed for the season, all smiling except for Papa. Maybe something he saw in the newspaper that morning was on his mind.

There were things to worry about. A few years later, the city – Warsaw – would be in ruins, and the parents would be dead.

Tracing what happened to the sunny family became a quest for Alice Switocz Goldbloom, who was to be the daughter of the young man in the photo. For many years her mother, Maria, and father, Edward, left unspoken what had happened when they were growing up in Poland and confronted with the cataclysm that was World War II.

Her parents’ silence was a way of protecting the three Switocz sisters. Raised in Sarnia, Ont., Alice Switocz’s concern was to fit in with other young people who led ordinary Canadian lives, in fact, to distance herself from the accents and foreign ways of her parents and their fervent Catholicism.

She was smart, energetic and ambitious, eager to break away from home. University was an escape route. Good jobs followed. She was assistant to a Liberal cabinet minister in Ottawa, and she started her own communications business in Montreal. She hired a man she would later marry, Jonathan Goldbloom, son of Victor Goldbloom, patriarch of the prominent Montreal Jewish family. Unable to have children of their own, they adopted two from Poland, the homeland her parents had fled.

All was going as Switocz Goldbloom wished. But the past, even a hidden one, has a habit of creeping out in unexpected ways. Her mother died in 2005, taking her memories with her, but in his final years, what her father recalled began spilling into Switocz Goldbloom’s consciousness.

Edward Switocz was by then an old man living in a Toronto care home where his daughter went often to visit. One day, to escape the tedium of the place, she asked him, “Do you remember the day the Germans bombed Warsaw?” “You should have asked me when my memory was sharper,” he replied.

But age does not dim such memories. Over the next months all that happened came tumbling out: the bombing of Warsaw in 1939, which left 10,000 dead, the uprising and subsequent liquidation of the Jewish ghetto, its population hauled off to death camps, life for Poles as “untermenschen” – sub-humans – under Nazi rule. Edward Switocz joined the Polish Home Army, which in 1944 rose up in resistance to the occupiers. Outgunned, it was defeated as the Soviet Red Army stood by across the Vistula River, waiting for the bid for freedom to be dashed. Two hundred thousand Poles died in the Warsaw Uprising.

Switocz became a prisoner of the Germans while his parents were sent to concentration camps, where they perished (his sister escaped to the countryside). As the Red Army rolled across Poland, the camps were evacuated – Jews, Roma, PoWs and other prisoners sent westward in tens of thousands on death marches. Switocz watched as most of the men he was with died while they trudged more than 800 kilometres into Germany, of fatigue and cold, shot by their captors when they could no longer walk. He had one keepsake with him, the picture of his family on that summer day in Warsaw.

After her father died, Switocz Goldbloom looked for her mother’s story. It was more of a sleuthing job. In archives and other sources, she traced Maria’s wartime days as a forced labourer, sent to Germany where she endured inhuman conditions, some particular to women that that would mark them for life. Her parents met in the Netherlands after the war, following stays in Displaced Persons camps in Germany, and they immigrated to Canada in 1951. Small wonder that in this country, they would want to shield their children from what they knew.

What Alice Switocz Goldbloom has learned about her parents compelled her to record their lives in the just-published book Family Secrets. The stories it contains are both revelatory and timely.

While the drama of the war and its trauma draw the reader’s attention, the book is also the story a woman’s journey, about how finding the missing pieces of a life were critical to the author’s understanding of herself.

Even as her parents kept the past from her, so too was occluded part of the story of what happened in Poland during the war. The massacre of the Jewish community has been recorded and is well-known, but the suffering of Polish Christians – 2.7 million died during Nazi rule – is a story that has been pushed into the shadows. This was the result of Poland’s new overlords, the Russians, supressing it. Moscow left no room for mention of what happened to Poles during the years a free nation was turned into a German slave state or, for that matter, one dominated by the Soviet Union.

There was also the contoversial tag of antisemitism and complicity borne by Poles for what happened to the country’s Jewish citizens. Only in recent years has this wound begun to heal in Poland and elsewhere in Eastern Europe.

Canada, too, has fostered healing. That Alice Switocz married into a Jewish family is central to the story. Having had to navigate between competing narratives of the past has led her to the kind of reconciliation between communities this country can offer.

Full disclosure: Alice and I became friends when she introduced me to Substack a couple of years ago. Earlier this week, I asked her what becoming a Goldbloom meant in the writing of Family Secrets. “I couldn’t have written the book without that happening,” she said.

The book’s timeliness comes from the understanding that we are once more in a moment when grievance and the hatred it promotes have infected societies that seemed immune from them. The price of immunity is commitment to the tolerance that protects the happiness of families like the one in the picture at the top of this post.

Family Secrets

By Alice Switocz Goldbloom

Pottersfield Press, 164 pp

This review of Family Secrets was originally published on Bryan’s Substack Life Sentences on May 1, 2025. You can find where to buy the book here.

Family Secrets is now available. Slightly ahead of schedule, which is a wonder given that it took me years to start writing it. You can order it online at Indigo or Amazon.ca, find it at your favourite indie bookstore (they can order it easily for you), or visit my website for more information.

While my book is not yet readily available in the United States, I am choosing to interpret this as Canada's moment — which, given everything, feels about right. My publisher tells me that selling books across the border has become genuinely complicated, what with tariffs and Donald Trump. So for now, Family Secrets is proudly, defiantly Canadian. You can order it from any Canadian bookstore (let me know if you need help and I can make it easy) or Amazon.ca. The ebook is coming soon as well. I'd love to know what you think.

But here’s what I really want to share with you…

I look for wonder every day.

I look for it — but I rarely find it, and certainly not every day.

Wonder is that moment in ordinary life that you weren’t expecting. But then there it is. You know it when it happens. Something shifts. Your breath catches. Time slows. Everything is clear.

I had several moments of wonder while writing this book.

The first was the moment I understood that I would write a book. I was immersed in my father’s story — tidying up notes from the fragments he shared during our conversations at the very end of his life. To make sense of those fragments, I had to understand history. And so I began sifting through history books, archives, wartime records, and documents.

A moment of wonder arrived when I saw that his story — and my mother’s — could only be told as part of history itself. I wanted to take the enormous, abstract machinery of history and see it at its human scale. To understand what it felt like to be two ordinary young people caught inside events so large they barely had names yet. To bring history down from the shelf and put it into a body, into a life, into a pair of eyes witnessing their world coming apart.

Somewhere in that process, I realized: this book isn’t only about them. It’s about me. It’s about what I didn’t know, what I was too self-absorbed to ask, and what I finally let myself discover. That realization was its own moment of wonder.

Another came on a morning when I opened an email from Lesley Choyce at Pottersfield Press. He wanted to publish the book. He said the story was important. That it should be known.

I sat with that moment of wonder for a long time.

Because it is not easy to be published in Canada. It is especially not easy when you are a debut author in your seventies. When I began this project more than five years ago, I had wondered whether I had started too late.

But it turns out there are advantages to waiting. You know more. You care less about the wrong things. And some books, I’ve decided, simply take a lifetime to write.

The book now exists, which is its own small wonder. My only regret is that my parents are not here to finally answer all the questions I should have asked sooner.

I hope you will buy it. And yes, I hope you will read it too.

Here are some reviews:

https://www.policymagazine.ca/family-secrets-a-daughter-uncovers-her-polish-parents-hidden-war/

The Seaboard Review of Books

The Seaboard Review of Books: A Wednesday Edition

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6 months ago · 6 likes · The Seaboard Review of Books

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I have missed my Saturday mornings writing here.

When I first started posting draft chapters on “Mother Land,” I had no idea the story would take me where it did. You were there from the beginning — reading those first messy drafts as I tried to make sense of the fragments my father left me at the end of his life, and the silence my mother kept for her entire life. Your comments kept me going. More than once, they convinced me the story mattered beyond our family walls.

So it is with more than a little wonder that I’m writing to tell you: Family Secrets: A Daughter’s Search for Her Parents’ Hidden War will be a real book on April 15. I still can’t quite believe it.

The book is part detective story, part bridge between academic history and lived experience, and very much my own memoir of discovery. It’s about what happened when my father broke decades of silence, and I set off through archives and historical records to uncover my parents’ hidden wartime past in Nazi-occupied Poland. His revelations were just the beginning. After his death, I discovered my mother’s story too — secrets she had guarded to her grave, secrets she never intended anyone to find.

What I found is that secrets shape not only those who keep them, but those who inherit them — and sometimes the story of an entire nation.

I was that girl in small-town Ontario, mortified by her parents’ accents, by the recess snacks and the clothes that marked her as different, wanting nothing more than to blend in. What I couldn’t see then was the magnitude of what my parents had survived to give me a beautifully ordinary Canadian childhood I took entirely for granted. Writing this book changed that.

It also left me with questions I’ll carry for a long time: What do we owe our parents? What did they owe us? And what do we all owe history?

One more thing, since some of you have asked: I began this project when I retired, more than five years ago, and I wondered then whether I was starting too late. I no longer think so. Your sixties, it turns out, may be the perfect decade for something like this — not just because you have the time, but because you have the perspective to see what you missed when you were younger, the patience for deep research, and the courage to ask questions you once avoided.

For those of you who followed along on Mother Land: thank you. Those early chapter drafts have come down — they’ve become Family Secrets, which will be available April 15.

If you’d like to pre-order, that would be amazing. The book is available on Amazon, Indigo and Paragraphe Books in Montreal (the Canadian options, just saying). You can visit my website for all the pre-order links.

With gratitude and more than a bit of wonder,

Alice

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I'm filled with gratitude for each of you who read and commented on my weekly chapters. This is my first foray into the writerly world, and your thoughtful comments and loyal readership turned what began as an uncertain venture into something truly encouraging. What started as a quiet voice sent into the digital universe of Substack found, through you, a purpose. Thank you for joining me on this journey.

The book is dedicated to my children—two remarkable individuals in their early thirties, adopted as infants from Poland. Raised in Montreal, they grew up steeped in the rich legacy of their paternal grandparents, pillars of the Jewish community. They saw their maternal grandparents only occasionally—two or three times a year—and had little exposure to their Polish heritage beyond opłatek at Christmas. This book began as a modest endeavour to fill in some of the blanks.

My project evolved as I sought to understand the era, place, and war that shaped my father’s, and later my mother’s early years. It culminated in the realization that I wanted my children to know they descend from a strong, determined, and resilient people and nation—a legacy embedded in their DNA. I hope their grandparents’ lives will inspire them, connecting them to their roots and the remarkable story of their heritage.

By seeing history through my parents’ eyes, my intention is not to diminish other stories or the bigger picture or to claim they suffered uniquely. To the contrary, what strikes me is how no Polish citizen escaped the crimes of the Nazi regime during the Second World War. Every Polish family carries some version of this wound. As right-wing extremism and authoritarianism surge globally at levels unseen since the 1930s, their story sounds less like history and more like a warning.

Today, as hate spreads through social media like a virus—fringe ideologies, conspiracy theories, ultranationalism, racism, antisemitism, strongman worship, old poisons in new bottles—I find myself returning to how ordinary people faced down darkness before. My parents' generation didn't have grand strategies. They had small, daily acts of defiance. In their stubborn resilience, I see a map for these uncertain times.

I owe my deep gratitude to my husband, Jonathan, who has provided support and encouragement for every idea and project I have ever pursued (and that’s a lot of projects!). I appreciate that he always listens.

One day stands out in my memory: I had spent hours that day reading a large portion of Ulrich Herbert's book on forced labour and had a moment of realization that I had found my mother’s story. Late that evening, as Jonathan drove home to Montreal from a meeting in Ottawa, I recounted what I had read over the speakerphone for the entire two-hour journey. I barely paused, continuing even as he walked through our front door. He kept on listening.  

I wish to acknowledge Dr. Richard C. Lukas, whose seminal history books in English on Poland during the Second World War were the first I consulted when I realized how little Polish history I knew. Dr. Lukas graciously responded to some of my original questions, which encouraged me to write this book. I extend heartfelt thanks to historian Dr. Tomasz Frydel for his invaluable guidance, particularly in shaping the historical aspects of this manuscript and my parents’ stories. His expertise has been instrumental in ensuring the accuracy of the historical narrative. Special appreciation goes to Lauren Fedewa at the University of Toronto, who provided valuable insights and thoughtful commentary on women in forced labour. These historians have enriched the overall quality of this work. I extend my thanks to all the authors and historians who have helped me comprehend the events that unfolded in Poland between 1939 and 1945, as well as the post-war period. Their collective wisdom has been indispensable in crafting what I hope is a nuanced account. Any inaccuracies in historical detail are solely my responsibility.

My lifelong good friend, Elisabeth Châtillon, read all the drafts of my book and offered much-appreciated encouragement and probing, constructive input. I appreciate all my friends and family who asked how the book was coming along.

I was privileged to work with Claire Rothman and Bryan Demchinsky, writers and great editors, and now friends who provided mentorship and support at different stages of my project.

And to my parents: if I could, I would say to them that on most days, I feel like the apple did not fall far from the tree, and for that, I am grateful.

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Polonsky, Antony, Michlic, Joanna B. (editors). The Neighbors Respond: The Controversy Over the Jedwabne Massacre in Poland. Princeton University Press, 2004.

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Zimmerman, Joshua D. The Polish Underground and the Jews, 1939-1945. Cambridge University Press, 2015.

Forced Labor 1939-1945: Memory and History. "Digital Archive."  https://www.zwangsarbeit-archiv.de/en/index.html