With crowdsourcing support, this summer, director Roxana Spicer strikes out to interview the last surviving witness to an epic story of survival and betrayal: her 88 year old aunt who breaks a 50-year silence.

The Traitor's Daughter

Update:

New perks include a Russian Themed dinner for four with the filmmaker:

The Red Corner

Stalin Stone Jewelery:

My Mother Went Missing For 1,000 days.

She carried a bazooka. Drank vodka. Swore like a trooper. And oh, yeah, my mother wore army boots. At last count, she had six alias’s, three husbands, three kids, three grand-children, and four great grandchildren.  And one hell of a story. This is her story, told for the first time, as best I can.

I am not a historian. I am the Traitor’s Daughter.

Her whole life was one dark, impenetrable secret.

Growing up, I never knew her real name.

Back in the Motherland, she was a kid herself when she joined the Soviet Red Army, and the largest force of female soldiers ever assembled in history. She took some parachute training. Landed on her ass. “Disgraced myself!” she laughed! But she got caught by the Nazis. She became one of Hitler’s Slaves, transported from camp to camp across four countries. She beat the odds. She survived.  When the war ended, she couldn’t go home. In Stalin’s eyes, she was a traitor.

Over the years, I never stopped collecting details, looking for clues to weave a timeline for the woman who locked me outside her private Iron Curtain. Last year, in the heart of neo-Nazi Germany, I discovered her Nazi work records, and then, in the Moscow gulag archives, another chilling discovery that changed everything I thought I knew about the woman known simply as “Agnes”.

This summer, I must return to the edge of Siberia, to the railway platform where my mother was reunited with her sister after fifty years’ separation. Now, it is my 88-year old aunt who holds the key to unlocking the mystery of those missing thousand days.

In August, I want to take a translator and a professional cameraman into deepest Russia, where statues of Lenin still guard over the deserted factories, a heart-beat away from the last gulag in Russia. There, my aunt will break a fifty-year silence.

It’s a story you don’t want to miss. With your help, we’re going to fill in the missing thousand days.