LOVE IN THE TIME OF CORONA

Nobody knows this better than me. At age sixteen I was recruited by the Heritage Front, Canada’s then-largest white supremacist group, and groomed to become its poster girl. I was indoctrinated into neo-Nazi conspiracy theories by notorious Holocaust revisionist Ernst Zundel, who became a grandfatherly figure and welcomed me into his home when I sought refuge from my abusive family. I spent two years believing the world was controlled by a shadowy, Illuminati-like cabal (the Zionist Occupation Government) intent on exterminating the white race, before the reality of violence made me defect from my adopted “family”, provide police with information, and testify against group leaders in a trial that resulted in convictions, jailtime, and contributed to shutting down the group.

After my defection, I lived on the run, swapping cities as often as I did aliases. During the years I spent in hiding I felt broken, unable to forgive myself, or figure out if I could ever have a normal life. I didn’t even know what “normal” meant. Back in Romania, both my parents had suffered terrible cruelty in their formative years; life under a repressive communist regime only exacerbated their hate of each other.  

My deaf father, who died two years after we emigrated, clawed his way up from being called the village idiot in his Transylvanian village, to becoming a successful painter and the president of the Romanian Deaf Association. As a child, my deaf mother was forced to sleep in a barn and herd goats. After being raped at age twelve by village boys, she was shipped off to a state boarding school for deaf girls, where she eventually met my father. Embittered by the knowledge that they would never get justice, my parents regularly expressed their pain with their fists.