The Ancestral Survival Story Isabella Skrypczak Is Sharing with the World
Written by: Andrea, Medium
Some stories survive wars, decades, and entire oceans before they finally find the person brave enough to carry them forward. For Isabella Skrypczak (Iza), founder of Iza Clara Healing, that story belongs to her grandmother, a woman who was ripped from her childhood in Poland at the age of six and sent to die in Siberia. And a big reason Isabella felt called to share it with the world is what happened inside her own body the moment she began translating those words from Polish into English.
Because the story that her grandmother survived did not stay in the past. It had been living quietly inside Isabella her entire life, waiting to be felt, waiting to be freed in the present day.
She Felt Her Grandmother’s Pain Before She Could Name It: Isabella Skrypczak on Ancestral Trauma Healing
In April of 1940, Soviet soldiers pounded on the door of a home in eastern Poland and forced a young mother and her six-year-old daughter, Ida Kinalska-Pietruska, onto a crowded train. They were deported to remote Siberia under Stalin’s mass wartime campaigns, and what followed was a childhood defined by starvation, disease, freezing winters, along with the agony of not knowing whether Ida’s imprisoned father was alive or dead.
Miraculously, Ida survived all of it. Despite the tragic start to her life, she led a prominent career in Polish medicine. As she was heading into retirement in 2011, she decided to publish her experience in her memoir, Syberia: Oczami Dziecka, in Polish. The book gained national attention across Poland, but for most of the English-speaking world, her story remained out of reach.
Isabella grew up on the other side of that silence. Born to Polish immigrants in Houston, she spent every summer in Poland with her grandmother. Those visits were full of warmth and the highlight of her year. But deep underneath, there was something unspoken, a gravity Isabella could feel in her chest long before she had any language for it. What she was sensing is exactly what practitioners of ancestral trauma healing describe as the emotional residue passed down through generations, not through stories told aloud, but through the body itself.
The Moment Energy Healing Found Isabella Skrypczak (She Was Translating a Memoir)
For years, Isabella built a career far from the healing world. She worked in HR in Big Tech and kept moving forward the way so many of us do when we sense something underneath the surface but are not quite ready to look.
Then war returned to Eastern Europe, and something cracked open. Her grandmother’s story of surviving Soviet deportation was suddenly more than a family inheritance. It was a living parallel to what was unfolding in real time, and it needed to be heard. So Isabella decided to bring her grandma’s memoir into the English-speaking world.
What she did not anticipate was that the translation and writing itself would become one of the most transformative experiences of her life. As she traced Ida’s words, feeling each sentence land in her own nervous system, old grief she had never named rose to the surface. Tension she had carried for as long as she could remember began to loosen. She was not simply converting language. She was engaged in a deeply personal act of energy healing, allowing decades of inherited pain to finally move through her body and out.
This is the heart of somatic healing: the understanding that trauma does not just live in our memories but in our muscles, our breath, our nervous systems. For Isabella, the doorway into that stored pain was her grandmother’s voice reaching across time, asking to finally be fully heard.
From Siberian Exile to Intuitive Healing: How One Book Changed Isabella Skrypczak’s Life
The book that emerged, A Polish Girl in Siberia: Surviving and Transcending Exile, is published through Disruption Books, a subsidiary of West Wing Writers. Kirkus Reviews praised it as “a testament to the resilience of the human spirit,” and Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Chief Curator at the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews, called it “an inspiring story of resilience against all odds.”
Ida did not simply endure Siberia, she used her pain as medicine. She became a pioneering physician in Polish medicine, dedicating her career to endocrinology and diabetology, including research that brought awareness to the Chernobyl disaster’s effects on endocrinological health. She received the Order Odrodzenia Polski, Poland’s second-highest civilian state award multiple times, and two Doctor Honoris Causa titles.
A child who nearly died in a Siberian Gulag grew up to help millions heal. When Isabella sat with that truth, she began to understand intuitive healing not as an abstract concept but as something threaded through her own bloodline. The strangers who showed Ida small acts of kindness in Siberia set off a ripple that echoed through her medical career, through Isabella’s childhood, through the pages of a translated memoir, and into the spiritual healing and emotional release Isabella now offers through her own practice.
Why Iza Clara Healing’s Holistic Healing Practice Is the Story the World Needs Right Now
Isabella often reflects on the idea that survival is not just physical. It is spiritual, energetic, and relational, woven into the connections between people who choose love when the world has chosen cruelty. That reflection is the beating heart of her holistic healing practice, which is rooted in the belief that when we turn toward the pain our families carried instead of away from it, we heal not just ourselves but backward and forward through time.
Through her intuitive healing work, Isabella holds space for people who carry a weight they cannot quite explain, those who feel a sadness that predates their own life, a restlessness that does not match their circumstances, a longing for something they have never lost but somehow mourn.
We live in a world where wars are still displacing families and children are still waking to pounding on their doors. The stories of what people endure do not end when the conflict does. They echo. They settle into bodies. They wait. And sometimes, generations later, someone finally listens.
That is why Isabella Skrypczak felt called to share this story with the world. Not because it belongs to the past, but because it is still speaking. And through the quiet, sacred work of Iza Clara Healing, she is helping the rest of us learn how to listen.
