Betty O’Neill grew up knowing very little about her father Antoni. She knew that he had fled Poland after WWII, that he had disappeared one night when she was a baby, and that his brief reappearance when she was a young adult had been harrowing and painful.

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. But what also becomes clear, through writing The Other Side of Absence, is the illumination of parts of her own life; as the only child of a single parent, Betty was fostered out to different families and then sent to boarding school at age 9. Her upbringing was often painful and lonely. The war cast long shadows. 

Betty’s search takes her to Poland, where she unexpectedly inherits a family apartment from a half sister she never met. Sifting through photos, letters, and other clues from her father’s life, she puts together a more complete picture of Antoni: Polish resistance fighter, a Catholic political prisoner, survivor of Auschwitz and Gusen concentration camps, an exile in post-war England, and a migrant to Australia. 

In researching this book, Betty travelled to Lublin and Poland on two occasions and to the concentration camps of Auschwitz and Gusen. She explored the archives of these camps and also the Polish Institute and the Polish Underground Movement Study Trust in London (all had files on her father) and to the Bata Shoe Factory and estate in East Tilbury, where her parents lived and where she was born, before they moved to Australia. 

Honest and compelling, The Other Side of Absence has elements of a cold case detective story. Evidence and facts gathered along the way reveal disturbing truths buried within a family. This is a memoir of resilience and strength as a daughter reconciles the damage and trauma wrought on families by war.