Mona Parsons: From Privilege to Prison, from Nova Scotia to Nazi Europe

Trevor S. Raymond is a teacher and librarian with the Peel Board of Education and editor of Canadian Holmes.

While researching a graduate thesis at Acadia University in Wolfville,
actor Andria Hill came across a tantalizing reference to Mona Parsons,
an Acadian graduate who had been born in that Nova Scotia town in 1901
and had died there 75 years later. Hill spent the next few years
discovering Parsons’s extraordinary life, tracking down photographs,
documents, and people who had known her in Nova Scotia, the United
States, and Europe. This book endeavors to tell the story of Parsons’s
eventful life and the sleuthing Hill did to uncover it. This is a fine
idea, but Hill starts to tell of her explorations too early; readers may
be frustrated by allusions to events in Parsons’s life about which
they have not yet read.

Mona Parsons was an Acadian graduate, a Ziegfield chorus girl on
Broadway, an honors graduate of the Jersey City Medical
School—although what this means is not explained—and then the wife
of a prosperous Dutchman. In Holland, her life of wealth and servants
ended abruptly during Hitler’s war when she was imprisoned by the
Gestapo for sheltering two RAF airmen. She spent more than three years
laboring in various hellish prisons before escaping, with another woman,
during an Allied bombing raid in early 1945. Her dangerous trek across
war-ravaged Europe, working and walking her way out of Germany towards
the Allied lines, and her eventual rescue by Canadian soldiers in
Holland form a large part of this book. It is an extraordinary tale.

Unhappily, there are no source notes, either for quotes or other
information Hill discovered. We are told what people were dreaming or
thinking. There is neither an index nor a bibliography; at one point,
Hill writes that she gleaned information from two books whose authors
she names, but she does not give even the titles of the books. Mona
Parsons deserves to have her extraordinary story better presented.