From Big Tech HR to Humanitarian: How Isabella Skrypczak Left Corporate America to Honor Her Grandmother’s WWII Story
Some career pivots are about escape. The really good ones are about arrival. Isabella Skrypczak’s career pivot is the second kind, and her story stays with you long after you finish reading.
For years, Isabella, who goes by Iza, lived a life that looked perfect on paper. A solid Big Tech HR career. Raising her daughter, Kamila, in Austin, Texas. The kind of resume people post and the kind of life Instagram loves. But underneath the success, something kept pulling at her. A quiet feeling that the life she was building was not the life she was meant for. And the thing that pulled her in the right direction was not a self-help book or a TED Talk. It was her grandmother’s WWII memoir.
Today, Iza is the founder of Iza Clara Healing, a holistic practice centered on her belief that people may carry patterns shaped by previous generations and can work to release them. Her story reflects an unusual founder journey shaped by personal and family history, and it started with a six-year-old girl in 1940.
The Polish Granddaughter Who Carried A Story She Did Not Know
Iza was born to Polish immigrants and raised in Houston. Every summer of her childhood was spent in Poland with her grandmother, Ida Kinalska-Pietruska. From the outside, those summers looked like classic warm grandmother visits. Tea, stories, walks, family meals. But underneath all of it, Iza absorbed something else. A heaviness she could not name. A grief that did not seem to belong to anyone she had met.
She says she carried that feeling in her body for years without realizing what it was. In Big Tech, she channeled the unnamed energy into performance. Corporate America often rewards women who push through discomfort and keep producing, no matter what is happening inside, and Iza was very good at that. She describes experiencing chronic tension, nervous system dysregulation and waves of grief that seemed to appear without an obvious trigger.
The Grandmother Who Endured Deportation to Siberia During the Stalin Era
What Iza did not yet understand was that the heaviness inside her belonged to a story her grandmother had lived but never fully transmitted in English. In April 1940, Ida’s family was deported by Soviet authorities to Siberia. Ida, who was six years old at the time, was separated from her father, who had been detained earlier. According to family accounts, the years that followed included severe hardship, illness, harsh winter conditions and prolonged separation from loved ones.
Miraculously, Ida survived. And she did more than just survive. She returned to Poland, went on to build a career in endocrinology and co-founded the School of Endocrinology and Diabetology in Białystok.
In 2011, Ida published her own memoir in Polish under the title Syberia: Oczami Dziecka. It received national attention in Poland. For years, the book remained locked behind a language barrier, including from Kamila and a generation of English-speaking readers who needed to know it existed.
The Translation That Changed Her Life
Iza thought translating the book would take a few months. The entire process took eight years.
Every sentence she translated required her to channel a moment her grandmother had lived. Memories of loss, hunger, family separation and displacement remained central to Ida’s recollections of that period. Iza describes feeling each sentence land in her DNA, one strand at a time. In some chapters, she could only translate in fragments. She had to stop and let the grief move through her body before she could pick the work back up.
What surfaced was not just her grandmother’s pain. It was a quiet fear of “the other” along with being in a near-constant state of survival that Iza had been unconsciously carrying her whole life. She had always believed she was open-hearted and tolerant. The translation forced her to admit she had been holding inherited rage and distrust toward entire groups of people, passed down through generations she never met. As she puts it, “How many of us speak about tolerance and love for others, yet haven’t done the inner work of feeling the unprocessed ancestral pain we still carry?”
According to Skrypczak, the process deepened her sense of empathy and understanding. Her grandmother had survived in part because of strangers who were starving and forced to work themselves, who kept giving anyway. Healing, she realized, was not invented. It was remembered.
The Book That Could Not Wait
Then war returned to Eastern Europe. Decades after World War II, the outbreak of war in Ukraine led millions of people to seek refuge in neighboring countries, including Poland. Ida, in her eighties, opened her home and hosted an eight-year-old Ukrainian girl named Kira. Watching her grandmother care for a child living through the same displacement she had survived eighty years earlier collapsed the distance between past and present. The events prompted her to revisit a family story that had remained largely unspoken.
A Polish Girl in Siberia: Surviving and Transcending Exile was published through Disruption Books. Kirkus Reviews called it “a testament to the resilience of the human spirit.”
What She Built From The Pain
Iza did not leave Big Tech because she was running. She left because the translation had shown her where she was supposed to go. Through Iza Clara Healing, she aims to help clients explore the patterns they believe may be shaping their lives, with an emphasis on reflection, self-understanding and a more mindful relationship to their personal histories.
Skrypczak says her approach to medicine was shaped in part by the emotional impact of translating Ida’s testimony. Iza is the granddaughter of a story that survived a regime designed to erase it. And she has turned the carrying of it into her life’s work. As Skrypczak explains, her goal is ‘to leave a planet where no child inherits war again.’