Karen Kirsten is the author of the new book Irena's Gift: An Epic World War II Memoir of Sisters, Secrets, and Survival. She is also a Holocaust educator. She grew up in Australia and now lives in the United States.
Q: What inspired you to write Irena’s Gift?
A: It started with a promise I made my grandmother after Schindler’s List. About a week after the movie came out, she asked me to take her out for dinner. For the first time, she talked about Auschwitz, how Dr. Mengele would line her and other women up for hours and inspected them with his white gloves and whip. She never knew when it would be her turn to be sent to the gas chambers. She told me things she had never told my mother.
A few years later, she let me interview her. On our last day, she said she worried what happened to her could happen again. She looked at me quizzically and asked, “You think someone will want to know all of this?”
“Yes,” I said. “I do.”
That’s when I promised her I would write her story.
Q: How much did you know about your family’s history as you were growing up, and how did you research the book?
A: Growing up, I knew my mother and grandparents were Polish Jews, and that my grandparents were atheist. But no one talked about the war. They were hiding everything behind these walls of silence. When I first asked my grandmother about the numbers on her arm, she told me she'd tattooed her phone number there, so she'd never forget it.
When my mother was 32, a letter arrived from a stranger, who told her that her mother, Irena, was murdered during the war, and that the people who raised her were not her parents, but in fact her aunt and uncle!
The letter also said, that as infant, she had been smuggled out of the Warsaw Ghetto in a backpack and later, as a toddler, rescued by a Nazi SS officer. She kept the letter secret from me. When I was a teenager, I discovered that the grandparents I adored were not mine.
Years after I interviewed my grandmother––Irena’s sister––I stumbled upon a US Army film clip of Dachau days after the Americans liberated the camp. The film was shot by Hollywood directors John Ford and George Stevens. The camera zoomed in a man with a pale face and a chin covered in stubble. I found myself staring at my grandfather, 34 years old, a stripped uniform hanging off his 83-pound frame.
“Why are you here as a prisoner?” the interviewer asks.
“Because I am a Jew,” my atheist grandfather says.
No one in my family had ever seen the film nor knew anything about it.
After this startling discovery, I began with my recorded interviews which I tried to verify. Then, I filled in gaps using deeply researched historical accounts, help from historians, archived documents, photographs, film footage, letters, newspaper articles, artifacts and diaries and recorded testimonies.
The biggest challenge was incorporating all the research to build fact-based vivid scenes from prewar Poland to postwar Germany, to Australia, where my mother and the people she thought were here parents immigrated as refugees.
To learn how to write a gripping narrative, I devoured and dissected narrative nonfiction, the likes of Laura Hillenbrand’s Seabiscuit, Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns, Tracy Kidder’s Mountains Beyond Mountains, and Kevin Birmingham’s The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce's Ulysses.
It took me 10 years to track down the everyday heroes who saved my mother and to piece together the mystery of my family’s survival, and to write Irena’s Gift.
Q: The writer Thomas Keneally said of the book, “Karen Kirsten proves family stories and densities of human affection, when they run up against the calamity we call the Holocaust, are as individual as fingerprints.” What do you think of that description?
A: It’s perfect! It’s such a crazy story, that when I tell people about it, they ask me, “Is it fiction?”
Q: How was the book’s title chosen, and what does it signify
for you?
A: My agent helped with the title. Irena’s Gift was originally titled The Letter, but I wanted
a title that better conveyed the hope and healing in this story.
The book is named for Irena, my biological grandmother. Her gift to the world is my mother, who despite the unspeakable traumas she endured and her loveless childhood––raised by “parents” who had lost everything, damaged by what they endured in concentration camps––she was able to forgive them. She was even able forgive the Nazi who killed her mother.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: Besides traveling the world (Irena’s Gift was published internationally) talking about how empathy can bridge differences and bring us closer together, I’m fleshing out my next book, which will be connected to a brave Polish man who smuggled food into the Warsaw ghetto to keep my mother and her family alive and helped get my mother and her parents out after the roundups for the Treblinka extermination camp began.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: I wouldn’t exist to write this book if a few people hadn’t shown kindness toward my mother instead of indifference or hate. Today, we live in a nation divided into “us” versus “them.” As people will read in Irena’s Gift, this can be a slippery slope towards dehumanization, then violence.
It’s time to get out of our bubbles and connect with people outside of them. To listen to their stories. To recognize that we all love our country and want the best for our loved ones.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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