Weaving mystery, history and memoir, Irena’s Gift is the captivating account of one woman’s personal quest to uncover the unspoken and give voice to her family’s secret war-torn history.
From the glittering concert halls of interbellum Warsaw to the vermin-infested prison where an SS officer is convinced to save a Jewish child’s life, to the author’s upbringing in a Christian home, this is a story of resilience, sacrifice, Jewish identity, intergenerational trauma, and the secrets we keep to protect ourselves and those we love. For readers of When Time Stopped by Ariana Neumann, I Want You to Know We’re Still Here by Esther Safran Foer, and House of Glass by Hadley Freeman.
"Irena’s Gift interrogates the messy complexity of family, both its tenderness and nurture but also its corrosive anger and rejection.” —GERALDINE BROOKS, New York Times bestselling author and Pulitzer Prize winner
In 1942, in German-occupied Poland, a Jewish baby girl was smuggled out of the Warsaw ghetto in a backpack. That baby, Joasia, knew nothing about this extraordinary event until she was thirty-two, when a letter arrived from a stranger. She also learned that the parents who raised her were actually her aunt and uncle. Joasia kept this knowledge hidden from her own daughter, Karen—until an innocent question unexpectedly revealed the truth.
Determined to understand the generational trauma that cloaked her family in silence, her own origins, and to help heal her mother’s pain, Karen set out to unearth decades of secrets and piece together a hidden history—from the glittering days of pre-war Poland to the little-known Radom Prison, where of 500 resistance members tortured, only 10 survived, her grandfather the only known Jewish one. There, Karen finds answers, yet not easy ones.
As she exposes her family’s saga of love and betrayal, countless brushes with death, precarious hiding places, and the astounding negotiation with an SS officer who saved her mother’s life, Karen must reconcile the complicated, multi-faceted truths behind human behavior.
Irena’s Gift weaves together a mystery, history, and memoir to tell a story of sacrifice, impossible choices, impossible odds, and the way trauma reverberates throughout generations. Yet it is also a story of resilience and bravery, revealing how love and hope, too, can not only prevail through the worst imaginable circumstances, but resonate through time.
A former marketing executive, Karen Kirsten is an Australian-American writer and genocide educator. who speaks around the world on the topics of hatred and reconciliation. Karen's essay Searching for the Nazi Who Saved My Mother's Life was selected by Narratively as one of their Best Ever stories https://narratively.com/narratively-top-20-stories-so-far/and nominated for Best American Essays. Karen's writing has also appeared in Salon, The Week, The Jerusalem Post, Boston's NPR, The Age (Melbourne), The Brisbane Times and The Sydney Morning Herald Karen has lived and worked in five countries across three continents and now lives with her husband in Massachusetts. You can find her on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.
