Ida Kinalska-Pietruska and Isabella Skrypczak, "A Polish Girl in Siberia: Surviving and Transcending Exile" (Disruption Books, 2026)
About this episode
Ida Kinalska-Pietruska recounts her childhood exile to Siberia and the resilience of the human spirit in her memoir, translated by her granddaughter Isabella Skrypczak.
A memoir of a child’s forced relocation to Siberia under Stalin’s Gulag system reveals the potential for true human kindness in the face of extraordinary hardship. 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. Ida published this acclaimed memoir in her native Polish in 2011. Here, Ida’s granddaughter, Isabella Skrypczak, translates her babcia’s words and provides additional context—including describing the remarkable life Ida has gone on to live as a pioneering doctor. In the vein of Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl, A Polish Girl in Siberia: Surviving and Transcending Exile (Disruption Books, 2026) chronicles Ida’s experiences on a lesser-known front of the Second World War. Together…
More episodes of New Books in Russian and Eurasian Studies
- Diana Cucuz, "Winning Women’s Hearts and Minds: Selling Cold War Culture in the US and the USSR" (U Toronto Press, 2023)
- Diana T. Kudaibergen, "What Does It Mean to Be Kazakhstani?: Power, Identity and Nation-Building" (Oxford UP, 2024)
- Molly Crabapple, "Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund" (Random House, 2026)
- Dmytro Soloviov, "Ukrainian Modernism: Modernist Architecture of Ukraine" (Fuel, 2025)
- Andy Byford, "Science of the Child in Late Imperial and Early Soviet Russia" (Oxford UP, 2020)
- Kirill Shamiev, "Imperfect Equilibrium: Civil-Military Relations in Russian Defense Policymaking" (Oxford UP, 2026)
Explore listener stats, chart rankings, contacts and more on the New Books in Russian and Eurasian Studies podcast page.