29 th
Polish Houstonian, Isabella Skrypczak, translated her grandmother’s book „A Polish Girl in Siberia: Surviving and Transcending Exile”. It is a story of her childhood experiences in Siberia, where she was deported at the age of 7, the story of forced relocation under Stalin’s Gulag system, and also a story of survival and human kindness.
It will be published this March and can already be ordered on Amazon:
Ida Kinalska-Pietruska wrote this memoir while Isabella provided additional context based on the stories she heard during the many summers she spent with her grandmother in Poland. She also narrates the audiobook version.
From the Publisher:
‘In April of 1940, six-year-old Ida woke to the sound of pounding on her door. Soviet soldiers forcibly packed her and her mother onto a train with thousands of their neighbors and deported them to remote Siberia, leaving them stranded to survive the brutal winter in subhuman conditions. Looking back, Ida shares their struggles: foraging for food, trying to reunite with her imprisoned father, spending weeks in a desolate hospital with typhoid fever, and adapting to shifts in the political climate to make the long journey home to Poland. In April of 1940, six-year-old Ida woke to the sound of pounding on her door. Soviet soldiers forcibly packed her and her mother onto a train with thousands of their neighbors and deported them to remote Siberia, leaving them stranded to survive the brutal winter in subhuman conditions. Looking back, Ida shares their struggles: foraging for food, trying to reunite with her imprisoned father, spending weeks in a desolate hospital with typhoid fever, and adapting to shifts in the political climate to make the long journey home to Poland.’
Buy – Read – Comment!