Iza Clara’s ‘A Polish Girl in Siberia’ Tells the Story of a 6-Year-Old’s Fight to Survive Stalin’s Exile
Most career pivots start with burnout. Isabella Skrypczak’s started with a memoir she could not publish on the side. The Big Tech HR pro, raising her daughter Kamila in Austin, had built the kind of life that looks correct on paper, the kind women in their thirties are told to chase and maintain. But there was something quietly off about it, a low hum she could not name. The thing she ended up walking toward was a story she had inherited without realizing she had carried her entire lifetime: her grandmother Ida’s six-year-old self, ripped from her home in 1940 and dropped into the frozen edge of Siberia.
That story is now a book. A Polish Girl in Siberia: Surviving and Transcending Exile, translated and shaped by Iza herself, was published through Disruption Books and called “a testament to the resilience of the human spirit” by Kirkus Reviews. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Chief Curator at the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews, named it “an inspiring story of resilience against all odds.” The book is a result of a granddaughter refusing to let a grandmother’s voice remain unheard.
The Pounding On The Door
It’s April 1940: Ida Kinalska-Pietruska is six years old when Soviet soldiers pound on her family’s door before dawn. Within hours, she and her mother are forced onto a train alongside thousands of Polish families. Unbeknownst to them at the time, the destination is Siberia. Her father has already been imprisoned separately. Ida will spend the next several years foraging for food in subhuman conditions, surviving typhoid fever in a desolate hospital, enduring brutal winters, and adapting to political shifts that determine whether her family lives or dies.
This is the lesser-known front of the Second World War, the one that does not get the movies. Soviet deportations of Polish citizens remain underwritten in Western history, and that gap is part of why Iza could not leave the book on her hard drive. As Russia’s war on Ukraine reignited the same patterns of displacement, the silence around what Ida lived through felt unbearable.
Image Credit: Isabella Skrypczak
How One Memoir Became Two
Ida did not stay broken. She returned to Poland as a teenager and began studying medicine. She became a pioneering endocrinologist, founded the School of Endocrinology and Diabetology in Białystok, led the region’s first endocrinology clinic for two decades, and authored more than four hundred publications. Her research helped make the world aware of the Chernobyl disaster’s effects on endocrinological health. She has been honored with the Order Odrodzenia Polski, Poland’s second-highest civilian state award, and two Doctor Honoris Causa titles.
Ida originally published her own memoir in Polish in 2011 under the title Syberia: Oczami Dziecka. It received national attention. But for years it remained inaccessible to the English-speaking world, including to Iza’s daughter Kamila and the broader generation of women whose grandmothers and great-grandmothers had survived the same era and never told the story.
Iza spent every childhood summer with Ida in Poland. She absorbed the warmth of those visits and a tension she did not understand until decades later, when she finally sat down and started translating. Something happened that she had not expected. Grief she had never named rose up. The chronic tension she carried softened. She realized her grandmother’s survival had been living inside her nervous system the whole time.
The Translation That Cracked Her Open
Iza had built her career in HR at Big Tech. She was good at it. She understood organizational systems, people dynamics, the rhythms of corporate America. But her body kept telling her something her resume could not explain. Translating Ida’s memoir gave her the language for it. Inherited grief is real. Ancestral memory lives in tissue. The body keeps its own record of what previous generations could not afford to feel.
When millions of Ukrainians began crossing the Polish border to flee Russia’s invasion, Iza could no longer let her grandmother’s story stay behind a language wall. Ida herself was hosting an eight-year-old Ukrainian refugee named Kira at the time. Watching that, Iza understood something about cycles. Unresolved war wounds keep feeding violence forward through generations. The only way out is feeling the pain, releasing it, and refusing to let trauma stay buried.
So she finished the translation. She added context. She wrote her grandmother’s life into English with the kind of intimacy only a granddaughter could bring. The book hit shelves at independent bookstores, including the iconic Book People in Austin, and has been compared by reviewers to the spirit of Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl.
Image Credit: Isabella Skrypczak
The Founder Who Followed The Story
Iza did not leave corporate America because she was running. She left because the translation had shown her where she was supposed to go. Today, she runs Iza Clara Healing, a holistic practice rooted in helping others release inherited patterns and emotional weight they did not choose to carry. She offers emotional release, intuitive healing, and somatic work designed to help people trace the threads of their family history and gently let go.
Her practice is not built on theory. It is built on what happened to her when she translated Ida’s words. The work is personal, and so is the conviction underneath it. Iza puts it simply: healing is not invented, it is remembered.
For women at their own crossroads, wondering if the pull they feel toward something less conventional is real or reckless, Iza’s story lands harder than the usual career pivot piece. Sometimes, the most strategic thing a person can do is honor what their body has been quietly trying to tell them. Sometimes the work waiting on the other side is bigger than anything a five-year plan could imagine. And sometimes the answer arrives as an old memoir, written in a language not everyone can read, asking to be carried into the world.
A Polish Girl in Siberia is on shelves now. The work it began in its translator is still unfolding.
