Karen Kirsten spent afternoons as a young child at the home of her Polish grandparents in Melbourne, Australia, eating cakes from her grandmother’s favorite patisserie and listening to classical music. Adored by her maternal grandparents Alicja and Mietek, both Holocaust survivors, she could not understand why they never spoke about their past. As a young adult, she wondered why she was taught nothing about Judaism, and she struggled to explain her mother’s tales of a troubled and abusive childhood with parents she claimed did not love her.
What Kirsten didn’t know is that when her mother, Joasia, was 32, she received a letter from a stranger that blew open her world. It was from her real father—not Mietek, but another man who was living in Canada—and he wrote that her actual mother, Alicja’s sister Irena, was fatally shot by the Nazis in occupied Poland. Joasia would soon learn that as a baby, her father smuggled her out of the Warsaw ghetto in a backpack. Alicja and Mietek, her aunt and uncle, never told her the truth. And like her aunt and uncle, Joasia kept these revelations a secret from her own children for decades.
Irena’s Gift: An Epic WWII Memoir of Sisters, Secrets, and Survival chronicles Kirsten’s remarkable, decade-long quest to understand and heal the transgenerational trauma of war on her family. Using historical accounts, interviews and extensive archival research, Kirsten movingly reconstructs scenes of violence and heroism in the lives of everyday people, most notably the extraordinary women who came before her. After years of emotionally intense research reconstructing her mother’s and grandparents’ past, Kirsten takes Joasia to Poland to uncover the origins of their pain.
Pain sometimes travels through families until someone is ready to feel it. This memoir is the result of Kirsten’s journey to break open the seal of suffering and rebuild her family’s Jewish identity after decades of silence. Irena’s Gift is a beautifully written testimony to the power of memoir to heal and recreate a family’s history.
