Betty O’Neill Betty O’Neill i(12016023 works by)
Gender: Female
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1 2 y separately published work icon The Other Side of Absence The Other Side of Absence : Discovering My Father's Secrets Betty O’Neill , Paddington : Impact Press , 2020 18805726 2020 single work autobiography

'Betty O’Neill grew up knowing very little about her father, Antoni. She knew that he had fled Poland after World World Two, that he had disappeared overnight when she was just an infant, and that his brief reappearance when she was a young adult had been a harrowing, painful ordeal.

'Fifty-five years after he deserted her family, Betty becomes determined to solve the mystery of her absent father and discover exactly who was Antoni Jagielski.

'When her search takes her to Poland, Betty unexpectedly inherits a family apartment from the half sister she never knew – a time capsule of her father’s life. Sifting through photos and letters she begins to piece together a picture of her father as a Polish resistance fighter, a survivor of Auschwitz and Gusen concentration camps, an exile in post-war England, and a migrant to Australia. But the deeper she searches, the darker the revelations about her father become, as Betty is faced with disturbing truths buried within her family.

'Honest, compelling, and meticulously researched, The Other Side of Absence is an elegant debut memoir of resilience and strength, and of a daughter reconciling the damage that families inherit from war.' (Publication summary)

1 I Can’t Call Australia Home : Finding My Father in the Archives Betty O’Neill , 2017 single work criticism
— Appears in: Life Writing , vol. 14 no. 4 2017; (p. 505-518)

'Through a hybrid memoir and non-fiction writing format, this essay explores the research and reconstruction of my father’s life: a patremoir project examining an encounter with a rescued family archive that revealed my father’s secret other life and a longing for ‘home’ unquenched by immigrant life in the ‘land of opportunities’. After twenty years of living in Australia, my Polish father, Antoni Jagielski, a WWII concentration camp survivor, decided to return ‘home’ to Poland, to his culture and to his other family. This work uses the lens of my father’s story and mine, to examine fractured families, separation, displacement, the transmission of intergenerational memory and the transnational history of post-1945 Australia. My research intervention, a field trip to Poland in 2013, unexpectedly uncovered a family archive consisting of letters, postcards, official documents and certificates, photos and material artefacts. Additional information about my father’s life has been gathered from archives in Auschwitz, Mauthausen/Gusen, the Polish Underground Movement Study Trust and the Polish Institute in London. This diversity of sources, typical for scholars in this part of the world researching immigrant family stories, has provided the fragments to make meaning of a life and the difficulties of post-war immigration to Australia.' (Publication abstract)

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