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

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.