How Isabella Skrypczak Turned Her Grandmother’s Gulag Survival Story Into a Healing Mission for Humanity
Written by: Nia Bowers, LA Weekly
Some people find their purpose through a career pivot or a spiritual awakening. Part of Isabella Skrypczak’s (Iza) was inside a memoir her grandmother wrote about surviving Siberia at the age of six. With each translated word from Polish into English, she felt something crack open in her chest that had been lurking in the shadows her entire life.
Today, Isabella is the founder of Iza Clara Healing, a holistic healing practice built on the understanding that the stories our families survived do not disappear when the crisis ends. They live on in the bodies of the people who come after, and they wait, sometimes for generations, for someone brave enough to finally feel them.
Isabella Skrypczak’s Grandmother Survived Stalin’s Deportations. The Story Did Not End There
In April of 1940, Soviet soldiers forced six-year-old Ida Kinalska-Pietruska and her mother onto a train in eastern Poland and deported them to Siberia under Stalin’s wartime campaigns. What followed were years of starvation, typhoid fever, freezing winters, and the anguish of separation from Ida’s imprisoned father. She was a child surviving conditions that would have broken most adults.
But Ida did far more than survive. She became a pioneering physician in Polish medicine, dedicating her career to research on the Chernobyl disaster’s effects on endocrinological health, earning the Order Odrodzenia Polski, Poland’s second-highest civilian state award, and two Doctor Honoris Causa titles. In 2011, she published her memoir, Syberia: Oczami Dziecka, to national attention across Poland.
And then, decades later, her granddaughter picked up those words and carried them into English.
Isabella, born to Polish immigrants and raised in Houston, spent every childhood summer in Poland with Ida. She had always sensed something heavy underneath the love in her grandmother’s home, a grief nobody named. For years, she built an HR career in Big Tech, raising her daughter Kamila in Austin, carrying that unnamed weight without knowing what it was. She did not yet understand why her body held a sadness that did not match her own biography.
The Translation That Became an Act of Energy Healing
As she moved through Ida’s words, something shifted inside her body. Grief she had carried since childhood rose to the surface. Chronic tension she had accepted as normal softened and released. She was not just converting language. She was experiencing energy healing in real time, feeling decades of inherited pain move through her instead of staying locked in her muscles and nervous system.
When war returned to Eastern Europe, Isabella felt an urgency a clear calling she could no longer push aside. So she began translating the memoir, and WwWhat she expected to be a A literary project became the most transformative experience of her life.
The resulting book, A Polish Girl in Siberia: Surviving and Transcending Exile, published through Disruption Books, earned praise from Kirkus Reviews as “a testament to the resilience of the human spirit.” But the translation gave Isabella something no review could capture. It gave her a direct, embodied understanding of ancestral trauma healing and the way survival patterns travel silently through a family’s bloodline until someone stops long enough to listen.
How Iza Clara Healing Grew From One Woman’s Inherited Grief
That experience became a pivotal stepping stone Isabella offers through Iza Clara Healing today. Her practice draws on intuitive and energy healing woven with somatic awareness to help people trace the invisible threads connecting their present-day struggles to the experiences their families endured long before they were born.
What makes her approach feel so genuine is that she is not offering a method she studied from a distance. She lived and studied it. She felt her grandmother’s exile release from her own body, and that embodied understanding shapes every session she holds. Her work in spiritual healing and emotional release meets people in the tender space where personal pain and family history overlap, where the ache one carries might not belong to your own story at all.
Isabella is not asking anyone to relive their family’s worst moments. She creates space for what was never witnessed to be acknowledged and released. And in a cultural moment when so many of us are waking up to the realization that wellness means more than green juice and meditation apps, her holistic healing practice offers something deeper: the chance to heal not just yourself but the very human lineage that made you.
For anyone who has ever sensed that the weight they carry started long before they did, the work Isabella Skrypczak does through Iza Clara Healing is proof that turning toward your family’s hardest story can become the most healing thing you ever do.
