Joasia Kirsten grew up feeling like she didn’t belong. She had violent nightmares and remembered a place she was hidden as a child, but her parents didn’t want to talk about it.
A Polish Jew, Joasia and her family arrived in Melbourne as refugees after World War II.
They had been through some unthinkably traumatic experiences, and, as a result, Joasia’s life became shrouded in secrets, created in the mistaken belief they’d protect her. It was only when Joasia was in her thirties that she finally discovered the truth.
Joasia’s daughter, Karen Kirsten, tells New Idea her mother received a letter from Canada from a man who said he was her father.
“It explained [Joasia] had been smuggled out of the Warsaw ghetto as a baby in a backpack and then cared for by her mother’s sister,” Karen reveals.
Joasia’s biological mother, Irena, died during the war, and the parents Joasia had grown up with, Alicja and Mietek, were in fact her maternal aunt and uncle.
“It was liberating for her to know the truth,” Karen says of her mother. “I was nine at the time and I remember her totally changing. It was like a weight off her shoulders. She was so happy.”
Incredibly, Joasia didn’t tell Karen the story. Alicja and Mietek were terrified Karen wouldn’t love them anymore, so the family continued to keep the secret. It would be many more years until Karen learnt of it for herself.
“We’d never talked about the war and what happened. I grew up thinking my grandmother had her phone number tattooed on her arm so she didn’t forget it,” Karen says.
“Finding out about my mother made me understand her better and I started asking a lot of questions.”
Soon after Karen’s discovery, Alicja agreed to talk to her properly about her experiences in Auschwitz, the notorious concentration camp, and her escape from Poland.
“Alicja once traded her wedding ring for a tiny cube of bread,” Karen reveals. “She wondered how could she explain these things to people in Australia? She thought nobody would believe her. She had built this wall of silence and secrets.
“I spent five days interviewing her and on the last day she told me she was worried it would happen again. I promised her I’d write her story.”
Caught up with work in America, where she still lives in Boston, it took Karen many more years to finally start down that path but in 2012, she quit her job and travelled to Poland to see what she could uncover.
“I found the people who’d rescued my mother and also certain things and experiences I could never tell her about,” Karen explains.
By this time, Alicja had died. In 2018, shortly before Joasia passed away, Karen was able to read the manuscript of Irena’s Gift to her, a memoir preserving her family’s incredible story.
“She clung to every word and at the end she bawled her eyes out and thanked me for giving her the best thing that had ever happened to her,” Karen says. “I think it was some closure on her life. She finally understood what was haunting her.”