One of the methods that people use to withstand trauma is to put up mental and emotional walls to distance themselves from the experience. Author Karen Kirsten’s grandparents built a twisted fortress of secrets and denial after surviving the Holocaust that she has spent the last decade unraveling.
She recently sat down with The Washington Times’ Higher Ground to talk about her book, “Irena’s Gift: An Epic WWII Memoir of Sisters, Secrets and Survival,” and highlight how the truth helped bring healing to her family, as well as unexpected lessons about humanity that the whole world needs to hear.
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“When [my mother] was 32, she got this letter from a stranger, [her biological father], who told her that during World War II, she had been rescued. She’d been smuggled out of the Warsaw Ghetto in a backpack. And later, as a toddler, she was rescued by a notorious Nazi SS officer,” Mrs. Kirsten revealed. “And the letter said that her biological mother, Irena, had been murdered. And most shocking, that the parents who raised her [and with whom she had a very strained relationship,] were not her biological parents. They were actually her aunt and uncle. And she kept all of this secret from me. And when I was a teenager, I found out that the grandparents I adored weren’t my biological grandparents.”
And it turns out that the letter was just the tip of the iceberg. When Mrs. Kirsten was in her 20s, her grandmother asked her to take her to see “Schindler’s List.” A week later, the two went to dinner and her grandmother told her all about Dr. Mengele, “who the Auschwitz prisoners call the angel of death.” Despite struggling to come to terms with what her family had endured, Mrs. Kirsten felt she had to hear the whole story — so she asked for an interview.
“To this day, [my grandmother] had never told anyone else in the family about Auschwitz. And on the last day, she told me that she worried what would happen to her would happen again,” Mrs. Kirsten said. “And she asked me if I thought someone would want to know her story. And that is when I promised her, I would tell it.”
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The former marketing executive soon learned why her grandparents had worked so hard to put their Holocaust past behind them. And why the world must remain vigilant in upholding our promise of “never again.”
“To write ‘Irena’s Gift,’ I had to study the effects of war and horrible trauma on people like my mother,” Mrs. Kirsten said. “And I think, honestly, that is key to de-escalating hate and violence anywhere in the world, is if we see all innocent people who are suffering in this conflict as someone’s daughter, someone’s son, someone’s mother, someone’s father, and humanizing those people as individuals, people who need our compassion and help.”
That’s not to say that choosing to help people in the midst of war and conflict is an easy thing to do. On the contrary, it often requires taking risks and making sacrifices — just like the people who helped Mrs. Kirsten’s mother survive the Holocaust.
“There was a death penalty at the time for anybody who tried to help a Jew,” Mrs. Kirsten said. “[But the people who helped my mother] were typically humble people who just, they told their family members after that, that they were just doing what they thought was the right thing to do. They didn’t necessarily see my mother as a Jewish child. They didn’t put her in that category. They saw a little girl who was hungry, who was crying for her dead mother and they had empathy for that child. That kind of empathy is more of what we need to see today and it has the power to save people’s lives.”
The stories of her mom’s heroes are especially fresh in mind as Mrs. Kirsten considers the massacre on Oct. 7, 2023 in Israel and ongoing war in the region. And she hopes the world will take note and choose to do the right thing.
“I think particularly in the world that we’re living today, we have a choice. To continue to stick to our groups and stay in our bubbles, or we can reach out to people who might think differently from us and listen respectfully to each other’s stories and learn more about each other,” she said. “And if we don’t, I guess the warning, there’s a warning in the book too, because I document what happened in the 1930s and the parallels that we’re seeing today, we need to come together instead of pushing each other further apart. And that’s what I would love people to be inspired by.”
“Irena’s Gift: An Epic WWII Memoir of Sisters, Secrets and Survival” is now available everywhere books are sold.
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Marissa Mayer is a writer and editor with more than 10 years of professional experience. Her work has been featured in Christian Post, The Daily Signal, and Intellectual Takeout. Mayer has a B.A. in English with an emphasis in Creative Writing from Arizona State University.
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