BookPeople Presents: Isabella Skrypczak - A Polish Girl in Siberia

Please welcome Isabella Skrypczak and Rachel Merrill Moss in partnership with Dot Dot Dot Connect and Austin Polish Society to celebrate Polish Girl in Siberia! This event is free and open to the public. * Start time: 7:00 P.M. * Run time: 45-60 minutes, followed by a signing line. * Location: The second floor of BookPeople. The author will be signing and personalizing copies of the book after the speaking portion of the event. * To get a book signed, a copy of the event book or an item of equal value must be purchased from BookPeople. * For high volume events, post-talk signing lines can become very long. For such events, we recommend arriving and checking in to the event early as that will get you into an earlier signing group. Guidelines: * Seating will be on a first-come, first-served basis and is not guaranteed. * If you have any other questions, please visit our Eventbrite FAQ. If your question isn't covered in the FAQ, feel free to email us at online@bookpeople.com. * All event guidelines are subject to change. * BookPeople reserves the right to cancel or postpone this event if necessary. * There will not be a live stream or recording available. About the book: 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 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. About the author: Isabella Skrypczak is an author, intuitive healer, and former HR professional in Big Tech whose work bridges the seen and unseen. Born to Polish immigrants and raised in Houston, Texas, she spent every summer with her grandmother in Poland. When her grandmother’s memoir gained national attention in Polish media, Iza felt called to translate it into English— an act of love, remembrance, and advocacy. As war returned to Eastern Europe, she recognized the urgency in sharing this history with the Western world. She lives in Austin, Texas, with her daughter, Kamila. About the moderator: Rachel Merrill Moss (PhD Northwestern University) is Assistant Professor of Theatre History in the Performance as Public Practice program in Theatre & Dance, with faculty affiliation in the Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies and the Schusterman Center for Jewish Studies at UT Austin. Her work examines Polish and Yiddish theatrical and public performances of Jewishness across the long twentieth century in Poland. Rachel was a 2018-19 Fulbright Student Research Fellow in Poland, and the 2022 recipient of the International Federation for Theatre Research New Scholars’ Prize. She was the production dramaturg for the recent New York City premiere of Tadeusz Słobodzianek’s Our Class, which was named Wall Street Journal “Best Theatre of 2024,” and won for Outstanding Revival at the 2025 Lucille Lortel Awards. About Dot Dot Dot Connect: Dot Dot Dot Connect [https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__dotdotdotconnect.org_&d=DwMFaQ&c=euGZstcaTDllvimEN8b7jXrwqOf-v5A_CdpgnVfiiMM&r=NVVC2nj0dLdUWPJKwKRh4nebWzxcfOJecKOs-d4gs4M&m=U94QQweYU61foxzIfV8hoHIiPoQ5OaSpFFwruzc-clEKMvLjSh0lbCAbp-mFbNKL&s=r5W2yApyG2WqRR7emJIUmRafkfznVwchP-Rgghx3Dd8&e=] is an Austin-based arts non-profit with a mission to connect people through art. We strongly believe that art is the connective tissue across cultures, borders, and human-made divisions and is the creative power for the good. Our personal experiences as immigrant women are the driving force behind our mission. We create opportunities for Texas artists to connect with artists from around the world. We look for and create connections between different art fields and seek to collaborate with groups devoted to promoting film, music, visual arts, literary, and culinary arts. About Austin Polish Society: Austin Polish Society [http://austinpolishsociety.org/members/] is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization formed in 2005 by a group of passionate people who wanted to keep the Polish culture, language and heritage alive in the Austin area. The mission of APS is to establish a society open to the general public: * To encourage, and further knowledge of Polish culture, traditions, history, language, arts, current affairs, and local events. * To foster friendly relations between the American and Polish people. By purchasing a book from BookPeople, you are not only supporting a local, independent business – you’re showing publishers that they should continue sending authors to BookPeople. Thank you for supporting Isabella Skrypczak, Rachel Merrill Moss, Dot Dot Dot Connect, Austin Polish Society, and your local independent bookstore!