# Ida Kinalska-Pietruska and Isabella Skrypczak, "A Polish Girl in Siberia: Surviving and Transcending Exile" (Disruption Books, 2026)

Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/new-books-in-biography-memoir-580642/ida-kinalska-pietruska-and-isabella-skrypczak-a-polish-girl-in-siberia-surviving-and-transcending-exile-disruption-books-2026
Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/new-books-in-biography-memoir-580642/ida-kinalska-pietruska-and-isabella-skrypczak-a-polish-girl-in-siberia-surviving-and-transcending-exile-disruption-books-2026.md
Podcast: [New Books in Biography & Memoir](https://stenobird.com/podcast/new-books-in-biography-memoir-580642)
Published: 2026-06-14T08:00:00+00:00
Episode link: https://pdst.fm/e/traffic.megaphone.fm/NBNK9343038016.mp3
Audio file: https://pdst.fm/e/traffic.megaphone.fm/NBNK9343038016.mp3
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JSON: https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/new-books-in-biography-memoir-580642/episodes/ida-kinalska-pietruska-and-isabella-skrypczak-a-polish-girl-in-siberia-surviving-and-transcending-exile-disruption-books-2026
Duration seconds: 3950

## Resource

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, Ida and Isabella reflect on how every small act of kindness contributed to Ida’s liberation from exile and ability to build a life and a family. Her story celebrates the capacity of the human spirit to not only survive trauma but thrive beyond it.Ida Kinalska-Pietruska survived childhood exile to Siberia during the Soviet Union’s World War II assault on Poland. When she returned to Poland as a teen, she began studying medicine. A pioneering endocrinologist, she founded the School of Endocrinology and Diabetology in Białystok and led the region’s first endocrinology clinic for twenty years. Ida h…

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