Feminism-as a weapon against Totalitarianism.

It's an injustice and indication of systemic contempt for women that North America doesn't celebrate International Women's Day as a public holiday. It irked my mother during her younger years that Canada refused to acknowledge International Women's Day. She understood and often told me how feminism is a deadly weapon against totalitarianism.

At my mother's wake in the summer of 1999, memories of what International Women's Day meant to Mum returned to me after I had a conversation with my 82-year-old Polish/Belarussian godfather.

There, he approached me and said in a breathless, exacerbated voice. "Your mother was very liberal. She liked Pierre Trudeau too much.” He said it as a rebuke rather than a compliment. Thirty years on, my godfather still felt the sting of their arguments in the 1960s about women, society, the rights of gays and the importance of tolerance.

As a small child, I remember my mother debating my godfather or anyone about how democracy isn't a true democracy if women are denied autonomy over their destiny and bodies. She was a woman in her 30s in the 1960s, and relieved society had begun to redress its oppression against her sex. When Pierre Trudeau, in 1967, declared as Canada’s Justice Minister, "there was no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation.” My mother took this as a signal that government had begun to enter a more democratic age where social welfare included the right of choice for women and the beginning of gay and lesbian rights for citizens.

Mum was born in Hamburg in the autumn of 1928 when Germany was at a political and social crossroads.

She was the bastard child of a working-class Berlin gadfly who couldn’t decide if his ideology was womanising or socialism. Her mother was a manager for a hotel known for its cheap rooms, affordable grub, and prostitutes free of venereal disease in Hamburg's Reeperbahn district.

It wasn’t a good year to be born working class in Germany because its ordinary citizens were paying a heavy price in reparations to the Allies for being the losers in the first Great War ten years previous. It was, however, the best year; my mum would see in Germany until after the Second World War, as each year that followed 1928 was more unsettling than the next. Wall Street crashed in 1929.

By 1930 millions of Germans were out of work and on the breadline. In 1931 the banking crisis and recession caused Germany to plunge like an elevator shorn of its cables into a Great Depression, which ensured that in 1932, the Nazis became the largest party in the Reichstag. When Hitler became Chancellor in 1933, the momentum for Europe's descent into World War became certain.

The financial and political instability of the times necessitated my grandmother become the mistress of a man who could provide both physical and monetary safety during an era of extremism. As my mother said in later life about my grandmother’s lover/provider. “He wasn’t the best sort, but there could have been worse.”

Uncle Henry, as he was known to my mother, was an overweight, opportunistic importer of tobacco products. On weekdays, Henry deserted his wife and lived with my grandmother in an apartment he rented for her- located in a leafy suburb of Hamburg near its airport. On weekends, he returned to his wife and five children, who lived in a small town north of the city.

To Henry, this division of affection and time was a perfect arrangement except for one inconvenience; my mother. It’s not that he disliked my mum, just her presence in his life. “I was a talkative inquisitive child wrapped around my mother’s apron strings. I disturbed his lovemaking to my mother and his business scheming.”

Henry was good at schemes because he had convinced an importer of games, who also happened to be a communist- to sell a controlling interest in his company to him as protection against the Nazis.

That same cunning had Henry arrange for my mother to become a foster child to a working-class family in the Altona district that was short of cash.

There in 1932, as a four-year-old, my mother witnessed Bloody Sunday. That was when Nazi Storm troopers shot dead communists in her neighbourhood during a street battle that lasted many hours. My mother watched unarmed men killed by Hitler’s fascists.

In my youth, Mum told me a lot about her past in Germany, not everything- but enough for me to find her unique and different from all the other mothers in our suburban Toronto surroundings. My mother also told me these stories of her early life in a totalitarian state because she wanted to make sense of how she ended up in Canada, married to my father. From these stories, I learned life had mapped out many destinies for her other than the one she lived.

The Nazis, however, cast the darkest shadow over her destiny as they did to everyone from her generation.

Evil was done everywhere in Germany during her childhood. People normalised and rationalised it. They said to themselves. “This is the price for stability. This is the price for economic growth and employment. This is the price we must pay.”

As my mum grew into a teenager, she didn’t dissent like Sophie Scholl because that takes extraordinary courage. However, she tried not to conform to the norms by listening to foreign broadcasts of news or jazz. She was a problem teenager, even for her foster parents, who couldn’t handle her ”Hedda Gabbler” outbursts or her “dramatic” suicide attempt.

My grandmother’s lover had my mother exiled at the age of 13 to work on a farm for the war effort, where the farmer sexually assaulted her.

After the rape, my mother was chucked out for insubordination and indentured to a Nazi family in Cologne. Her tenure didn't last long because mum was caught in air raid where an exploding bomb caused third-degree burns on her back that required a stay in hospital.

The hospital was overwhelmed with other survivors of the air raid including a five year old boy in the bed next to her. He had been found alive buried in the rubble of his apartment that had taken a direct hit during the air raid. His legs were crushed in the accident and like my mother was in terrible pain and not provided morphine owing to wartime shortages. The boy called my mother, Liebchen, befriended her, joked with her, and then died in terrible agony from from gangrene.

All those bits and pieces of her early life, along with the intolerance she faced for being a woman and new immigrant to Britain and Canada- created her liberalism, feminism and also individualism. Mum distrusted groupthink and hated sanctimony and hypocrisy. Mum was left-wing but belonged to no political party despite stumping for Labour in the 1951 election to warn voters about fascism. If my mother could return from the dead in 2025. She would be horrified, disgusted and enraged at how humanity in the West surrendered itself for a second time in less than 100 years to fascism. She would also be outraged that International Women's Day still isn't a public Holiday in Canada or the USA.

Your subscriptions are so important to my personal survival because like so many others who struggle to keep afloat, my survival is a precarious daily undertaking. The fight to keep going was made worse- thanks to getting cancer along with lung disease and other co-morbidities which makes life more difficult to combat in these cost-of-living crisis times. So you can join with a paid subscription, which is just 3.50 a month or a yearly subscription or a gift subscription. I promise the content is good, relevant and thoughtful. But if you can’t it's all good too because I appreciate we are in the same boat. Take Care, John