There is a kind of mothering that does not show up on any milestone chart. It is the work of noticing what your child might inherit before they have to carry it. For Isabella Skrypczak, founder of Iza Clara Healing and translator of her grandmother’s wartime memoir, A Polish Girl in Siberia, that work shapes how she shows up for her daughter Kamila in Austin.
Iza’s family carries one of the heavier histories of the twentieth century. Her grandmother, her babcia, Ida Kinalska-Pietruska, was six years old when Soviet soldiers banged on her family’s door in 1940 and forced her and her mother onto a cattle car bound for Siberia. Many decades later, Iza translated Ida’s memoir from Polish into English while raising her daughter, and what surfaced during those years changed the direction of her life.
Babcia Ida: Siberian Survivor And Pioneering Doctor
To understand why Iza pours so much into clearing inherited pain for the sake of her daughter, , you have to understand Babcia Ida. After surviving years of forced exile, including typhoid fever, starvation, separation from her imprisoned father, and watching young friends die, Ida returned to Poland as a teenager and chose to study medicine.
She became a pioneering endocrinologist, founded the School of Endocrinology and Diabetology in Białystok, and led the region’s first endocrinology clinic for twenty years. She authored more than four hundred publications. Her research helped bring international awareness to the Chernobyl disaster’s effects on endocrinological health. She has been honored with the Order Odrodzenia Polski and two Doctor Honoris Causa titles.
Ida turned her childhood survival into a lifetime of healing others. Translating inherited trauma into service.
What Iza Was Carrying Without Realizing It
For years, Iza did not connect her grandmother’s history with her own body. She grew up in Houston as the daughter of Polish immigrants, spent every summer with her babcia =in Poland, and absorbed the warmth of those visits along with a tension she could not name. As an adult in HR at a major tech company, she kept producing, kept pushing through discomfort, kept showing up for her career and her own daughter.
But her body was keeping a record her mind had not yet read. The chronic muscle tension. The dysregulated nervous system. The strange grief that surfaced for no clear reason. She did not know yet that what she was carrying was older than she was.
The Eight Years Of Translation That Cracked Her Open
The shift came when Iza sat down to translate Babcia Ida’s memoir. Ida had originally published it in 2011 in Poland under the title Syberia: Oczami Dziecka. The words had stayed behind a language barrier for years, including from Kamila and the broader generation of children of immigrants who needed access to their family histories.
Iza thought it would take a few months. It took eight years.
Every sentence required her to channel a moment her grandmother had lived. The frozen body. The tiny, calloused hands from forced labor. The shakes of uncontrolled fevers. The pangs of hunger. The grief of separation from her father. The violation of being kidnapped from home and forbidden to return. Iza describes feeling each sentence land in her DNA, one strand at a time. Some chapters she could only translate in fragments. She had to stop and let the grief move through her body before she could pick the work back up.
What surprised her most was what surfaced alongside her grandmother’s pain. Iza had spent her life believing she was open-hearted and tolerant. The translation forced her to admit she had been carrying inherited rage and distrust toward entire groups of people, passed down through generations she never met. As she puts it: “How many of us speak about tolerance and love for others, yet haven’t done the inner work of feeling the unprocessed ancestral pain we still carry?”
The deeper she went, the more humane she became. Her grandmother had only survived because of strangers who were starving and forced to work themselves, who kept giving anyway. Healing, Iza understood, was not invented. It was remembered.
When War Came Back, The Book Could Not Wait
The translation was never just personal. As Russia’s invasion of Ukraine sent millions of refugees across the Polish border, the cycle Iza had been working to release was repeating in real time. Babcia Ida, in her eighties, hosted an eight-year-old Ukrainian girl named Kira, the same girl who would later text Iza about bombs in her neighborhood. Watching her grandmother care for a child living through the same displacement she had survived eighty years earlier brought the urgency into focus.
In 2026, Iza published A Polish Girl in Siberia: Surviving and Transcending Exile through Disruption Books. Kirkus Reviews called it “a testament to the resilience of the human spirit.” Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett of the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews called it “an inspiring story of resilience against all odds.”
What She Wants Every Mother To Know
Through Iza Clara Healing, Iza offers emotional release, intuitive healing, and somatic work to help people trace the inherited patterns shaping their lives. For mothers, the work has felt most urgent. Children inherit more than eye color and language. They inherit nervous system patterns, unspoken griefs, and beliefs about how much pain is normal to carry. The translation taught Iza those inheritances are not destiny. They can be felt, honored, and released.
Three generations of Polish women have shaped how Iza shows up for her daughter. Babcia Ida turned survival into service. Iza turned silent grief into purpose. Kamila gets the version of her mother who has done the inner work.
That is the quiet thing Iza wants every mom to understand. The trauma cycle ends in whatever generation chooses to feel it. Sometimes the most loving thing a mother can do is sit with the pain her grandmother could not, so her daughter does not have to. As Iza puts it: so we can leave this planet where no child inherits war again.