A Polish Girl in Siberia, page 1
A Polish Girl
in Siberia
A Polish Girl
in Siberia
IDA KINALSKA-PIETRUSKA
TRANSLATED AND EDITED BY
ISABELLA SKRYPCZAK
Washington, DC
This book is a memoir. It reflects the author’s present recollections of experiences over time. Some names and characteristics have been changed, some events have been compressed, and some dialogue has been re-created.
Published by Disruption Books
Washington, DC
www.disruptionbooks.com
Copyright © 2026 by Isabella Skrypczak
Originally published as Syberia oczami dziecka in 2011
by Ida Kinalska-Pietruska.
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. Thank you for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of this book without express written permission from the copyright holder. For information, please contact the publisher at info@disruptionbooks.com.
Distributed by Disruption Books
For information about special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact Disruption Books at info@disruptionbooks.com.
Cover images used under license from ©iStock.com/Picsfive and ©iStock.com/Neydtstock
Cover and book design by Rachael Brandenburg
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available
Printed in the United States of America
Print ISBN: 978-1-63331-140-4
eBook ISBN: 978-1-63331-141-1
First Edition
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For all of the children, both named and unnamed, who perished in the Gulag system.
For the countless souls who gave out of compassion even though they never needed to.
For Włodek and Lodzia—may their souls be healed from this devastating separation.
For my Babcia Dada, whose survival I am incredibly grateful for.
For Mama, her brothers, my brother, and my cousins—may this heal any bit of the Siberian trauma still living inside of you. May it bring us all closer together.
For Anna and Alex—may you both feel seen, as you are also part of this story.
And for Kamila. I write this so you can see how much of a miracle you are.
—Isabella Skrypczak
Contents
Foreword by Isabella Skrypczak
Siberia: Through the Eyes of a Child by Ida Kinalska-Pietruska 1 My Family
2 Eviction
3 Life on the Steppe
4 Railroad Construction
5 A Glimmer of Hope
6 Disaster at Seven Lakes
7 The Edge of Exile
Afterword by Isabella Skrypczak
Appendix: Selected Photographs
Acknowledgments
Notes
About the Authors
Foreword
by Isabella Skrypczak
MOST CHILDREN ARE AFRAID OF the bogeyman when they are little. Some imagined monster that hides under the bed or in the closet at night. I had no such imagined fears. My bogeyman was a Soviet soldier lurking in a dark corner, ready to jump out and capture me at gunpoint. For a child growing up in Texas in the ’80s and ’90s, this was not a normal fear to have. I didn’t know anyone else who grew up with this sort of paralyzing dread. The root of my fear came from the harrowing experience of my grandmother’s, my babcia’s, deportation to Siberia in 1940 as a six-year-old child. Despite the many years that had passed and the fact that I was born many years after World War II, the terror lived on within me.
I grew up as a first-generation Polish American in Houston, Texas, but my parents sent us off to Poland every summer to spend time with our grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins. It was a great way for my parents to save some money by avoiding expensive summer camp fees, but it was also an incredible way to have me remain fluent in my family’s mother tongue and stay connected with my family and roots. Looking back, I wouldn’t have wanted it to be any different. But it did come at the cost of absorbing the inevitable: the historical pain passed down to the next generations. It is incredibly difficult to explain to non-Poles the dual reality of what Poland was in the past and what it is today. It has awe-inspiring landscapes full of natural beauty; traditions rooted deep in family values; hospitality; and an authentic, polite culture with an extremely complicated language that is reflective of the complex nature of its people. But it also has a dark side: the reality of history. Growing up there, you feel the tragedies that occurred in every doorway, piece of sidewalk, crack in brick … as if there are ghosts feeding the undercurrent of the present-day hustle and bustle.
The forests are magnificent, with dense woods, berries, and flowers abloom during the summers. The mountains and lakes are peaceful and serene. The hospitality of the people is heartwarming. The food is comforting. The Old Towns of the villages and cities are charming. But you also never forget that people, at some point in time, were more than likely murdered in those same places. While walking in a park or forest, perhaps there is even a mass grave underfoot. There are reminders of death and tragedy everywhere. My father’s childhood home in Wrocław, for example, had huge bullet holes on the outside. For me, born forty-one years after the end of the war, it was very much a reminder of what had happened. Yet my father had to live somewhere. Monuments, plaques, and signs designating who died by whose hands dot a plethora of streets, buildings, and plazas across the country. But, alas, life moves on. Hipsters roam the streets of Warsaw. Multinational companies are located across the country. Young families live in renovated flats and take walks with their dogs. Joyous cultural, music, and art festivals take place multiple times each year. This dual existence of the terrible past and life moving on is complex—incomprehensible yet beautiful.
In the United States, it is commonplace to associate Poland with just a few things: German invasion, Nazi concentration camps, the Holocaust, poverty, Communism, the Solidarity movement, and the eventual rise of democracy. While these are all very much part of Poland’s history, they are just a partial component of its thousand-year-old existence. When I was going to school in the United States, little to nothing was mentioned about the “other” side of World War II—that of Stalin and his atrocities. I had the privilege of attending the best private schools, but throughout my education, which included an AP European History class sophomore year of high school and coursework for an international relations degree in college, it seemed as though no one had a clue about the Gulag system and the millions of innocent children, women, and men who perished under Stalin’s barbaric control. Anytime we had a history lesson on World War II, it was mostly centered around Hitler and the Holocaust, D-Day, Pearl Harbor, the nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and Japanese American internment. It is critical to teach these historical events to our future generations. In no way, shape, or form should any of those events be downplayed—but the World War II curriculum at my American schools did not tell my classmates the whole story of the global calamity and the nightmares that lived on within my body, interwoven with my family’s own history.
In 1919, the Soviet Union under Vladimir Lenin created the Gulag system to be used as a tool for political control, economic development, and mass repression. This vast system consisted of three main phenomena: forced transportation to the Siberian taiga, slave labor in camps, and collective work on farms called kolkhozes.
The Gulag served multiple purposes: It suppressed dissent, instilled fear across society, and provided the regime with cheap labor for massive infrastructure and resource-extraction projects. Its role intensified during World War II as Stalin’s regime expanded its borders to absorb parts of Eastern Europe and the Baltics. Entire populations—Jews, Poles, Balts, Ukrainians—including many people who had committed no crimes, were swept up in mass deportations and funneled into the Gulag or other forms of internal exile alongside Soviet citizens caught in the machinery of repression.
As Anne Applebaum details in Gulag: A History, an estimated eighteen million people passed through this brutal system which lasted for more than forty years, reaching its apex in the 1950s, with at least three million perishing from disease, starvation, overwork, or execution in the camps alone. Beyond the camps themselves, Stalin’s regime deported an estimated additional six million people, resulting in an estimated one and a half million deaths, reshaping the demographic and political landscape of Eurasia. As Applebaum states herself, the sheer humanitarian impact takes “educated guesswork,” so we will never truly know the exact number of human beings who died at the hands of this terrible regime.1 The Gulag was not merely a parallel to the Nazi concentration camp system; it was part of a vast network of Soviet terror that reflected both the brutal utopian ambitions of the regime and its deep paranoia, making it one of the defining horrors of the twentieth century.
It is hard to grasp the enormity of this system, as it spanned from the westernmost parts of the Soviet Union along the Baltic Sea all the way to the Pacific, bordered by the Arctic Ocean and the grasslands of Kazakhstan. The Gulag jailed, exiled, and murdered millions of people across decades, yet was banned from mention in the Eastern Bloc until the demise of the Soviet Union. Stalin was one of the winners of World War II, and as often happens, the winners decide how history is written and discussed.
This historical victory would result in the flat-out omission of my grandmother’s trauma in the American education system and wider Western consciousness. As the sole Polish American in the classroom carrying the weight of Babcia Dada’s pain, I felt isolated by this dismissal, wondering why my family’s experience wasn’t worth learning about. As I got older, I continued to feel the terror of her experience in my body; it was very real. I wondered: How was it not real to other people? How did they not know about what happened? Why was it so ignored? It made me feel unseen, unheard, small, unworthy … adding salt to the generational wound, consuming my body, forcing me to exist in a constant state of survival.
My grandmother, who is still alive today, also felt the weight of this omission throughout much of her adult life. Many years after her survival, she decided to put her experience into words, with the hope and intention of having her story heard.
My grandmother originally wrote her account of her survival in Polish and self-published her book with her own money. She never made a dime off her book. I remember her having many boxes of her book in her office. Anytime there was a visitor, she would give them a copy. I see now that her book also helped give voice to the little girl within her who had remained voiceless in so many terrifying, horrific situations throughout the years of the war and through the years of forced silence of the Communist era. And in doing that, she has given me the capacity to translate her story and to heal.
After spending so many of my own years doing anti-hate advocacy work, I am no longer carrying the burden of silence. Babcia Dada’s experience, as complex and incomprehensible as it is, is one that has to be shared. It reflects a very dark side of history, yet her survival and what she did with her life after the war are inspiring and beautiful. I am sharing my grandmother’s story of deportation by the Soviets to a gulag, so my future children and grandchildren can read and learn about the strength of their ancestor and recognize how miraculous it is that they are alive.
I am not a writer. I am a single mother who has worked a full-time, regular corporate job. I have plenty of things to keep me occupied in my own life. But if there is anything my grandmother’s story can give this world, it is the message to live from the heart and hold space and gratitude for the many souls who accompany us on our own unique journeys.
Babcia Dada was born Ida Teresa Soroko in Oszmiany, which is today known as Ashmyany, Belarus. Her exile to Siberia started in 1940, when she was just six years old. Her book was written in 2011, straight from her memory, from the perspective of a young Polish child. Demographically, Poland was extremely different prior to World War II. From the christening of the Polish kingdom in 966 CE until the war, Poland was an incredibly diverse country—the result of constantly changing borders and policies enacted by those in power over a thousand years. Poland’s population was a mix of ethnic Poles, Jews, Belarusians, Lithuanians, Germans, Ukrainians, Roma, and others. Religions included Catholicism, Judaism, Christian Orthodoxy, Islam, and more. There were Jewish, Yiddish-speaking shtetls located just a few kilometers from Belarusian-speaking, Christian Orthodox families claiming loyalty to the Polish crown. There were mixed households where people spoke multiple languages and practiced different faiths but all belonged to the same family. Prewar Poland wasn’t just full of Roman Catholic Poles, who make up the majority of the population today. It was a mosaic of different creeds, languages, traditions, and histories.
With regard to history, as in any other place in this world that has a diverse population, each ethnic group has its own perspective. Poland has contributed greatly to Western civilization and accomplished impressive feats on a global scale. These feats include notable contributions to science, philosophy, mathematics, literature, art, and other meaningful areas of society. It was one of the only countries in the world to have an elected parliament of nobles, called the Sejm.2 It was one of the first places in the world to welcome Jews and give them freedoms other kingdoms never dreamed to grant. However, as much as Poland granted religious freedom and tolerance toward minority groups, and as much as the golden era proved it to be forward-thinking and progressive for its time, not everything was perfect. Not everything was equally distributed, nor was every single group treated fairly. It would be remiss for me to publish my grandmother’s memoir without acknowledging that Poles were not always on the right side of history. On a systemic and individual level, there were discriminatory laws against non-Catholic Poles, pogroms carried out against marginalized groups, and other manifestations of inequality and injustice.
With that said, Babcia Dada’s writing comes purely from her community, a Polish Roman Catholic one, and her writing doesn’t always reflect the prewar Polish demographic mosaic. She’s no historian and was not ever trained as a professional author, so her writing is raw; I translated as if she were talking straight from her memory. I have included historical context in each chapter to help balance the rawness with a better understanding of the reality of her situation.
There are millions of other grandchildren like me who grew up absorbing their grandparents’ stories of starvation, poverty, and enslavement, who had fears of a Soviet soldier jumping out from under the bed to take them to a train, but there are millions more who don’t understand this inherited pain. I have watched my grandmother suck the bone marrow out of her chicken and practically inhale any plate of food put in front of her, as if it would soon be taken away. If you don’t answer her phone calls within five minutes, she falls into a state of panic, thinking you have been taken away or murdered. That’s partly due to her natural anxiety, but it’s also quite an understandable response after what she endured as a child.
What she managed to do after the war—in spite of what she’d been through—is the pure definition of alchemy.
I present this story to make sure we never forget. To honor her experience. To heal my ancestors and honor the lives of those who perished. To give voice to the stories that have been minimized, dismissed, shoved down into the shadows. To make the misunderstood feel understood. To make the unseen feel seen. To acknowledge that history is doomed to repeat itself—as it appears to be with Putin’s war in Ukraine—if it is not held in its entirety. This translation is an act of love for my grandmother, whose life experience shaped me into who I am today, for which I am incredibly grateful. It wasn’t her fault that the generational trauma was passed down to me. Bringing her story into the Western, English-speaking world is my offering of gratitude to her for everything she has done for me. I do this in reverence to my ancestors for surviving the unspeakable to ensure I could be here. And I do this to illuminate areas currently in darkness.
Siberia:
Through the Eyes of a Child
by Ida Kinalska-Pietruska
CHAPTER 1 My Family
I WAS BORN IN OSZMIANY on April 15, 1933. However, that was not my hometown. The only reason I was born there was because it was the town with the nearest hospital. My actual hometown was called Dziewieniszki, which was known to be a small, pleasant town, beautifully situated along the Gawia River on a small hilltop in the southeastern portion of the Solecznikowski region, part of the Wilno voivodeship, county Oszmiany. This land had wonderful beauty with charming landscapes, interesting monuments, rare nature, and extensive forests. It was inhabited by good, hospitable, and respectful people: ethnic Poles, Belarusians, Lithuanians, Jews—all who spoke their own languages and practiced their own creeds. The local school was run by my father, who was employed by the Ministry of Education. As the school director from 1929 to 1940, he welcomed children from all of these communities.
The Jews were the merchants of the town. I remember them being very kind. Their cemetery was right behind the school. I remember them praying there in large groups from time to time. I was an only child, so I didn’t have too many friends. But the Jewish children played with me in the streets, which I remember fondly.
I spent a lot of time with my parents, whose social life was quite active. Every Saturday, they threw fundraisers for the school. There were orchestras and bands that played music until 12:30 a.m. During the summers, we would visit my mother’s sister, Ciocia Zuza, who lived far away in a town called Smorgoń. I was always happy to visit her because I got to see my cousins, and they lived near a little creek we got to swim in. Their house had enormous bushes of red currants, which we would devour, our mouths and clothes turning red from the fistfuls of tart berries we were consuming.
