Irene Gut when she was a student nurse.
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
IRENE GUT, a 19-year-old Polish girl, took a seat in the church, her mind filled with worries about food and heat, worries that would have been inconceivable to her just a few years before. The German blitzkrieg that had rained fire from the sky two years earlier, when she had been a 17-year-old student nurse, had turned her beloved Poland into smoke, rubble, and ash. Irene had fled from the hospital with the other doctors and nurses as they had followed the retreating Polish army amid the screeching chaos of the blitzkrieg. They had traveled east for miles and miles with no particular destination; just as far away as possible from the unstoppable German onslaught.
After learning that their country no longer existed—that Hitler and Stalin had divided Poland between themselves—they ended up near the Soviet border in the forests of Lithuania and the Polish Ukraine in a desperate struggle to survive. And try as she might, Irene could never forget the worst experience of all: being discovered, beaten, and raped by Soviet soldiers.
Now she was finally back in her hometown of Radom, Poland. But it was not the same town she remembered. Swastikas were everywhere. Jews were beaten and mocked in the streets. Nazi soldiers regularly shot anyone suspected of overt rebellion as well as anyone who accidentally broke one of the numerous new laws. All the Poles were near starvation, eating what little they could get with the strict ration cards distributed by the Germans while the occupiers ate to their fill.
Irene was suddenly stirred from her worries. She could hear German soldiers outside the church, shouting orders loudly. They forced the worshippers outside and pulled the children and elderly people to one side. Then they piled everyone else, including Irene, into a truck. The captives were all driven to another part of Radom to work in a German munitions factory. There was no pay, little food, and the working conditions were grueling. Irene soon became very weak. One day she fainted on the job, right in front of an officer of the German Wehrmacht (regular German armed forces). When she awoke, she was in his office. His name was Major Eduard Rügemer. When he discovered that Irene spoke fluent German, he gave her a new job serving meals to German officers and their secretaries in the dining room of a large hotel near the munitions factory.
The hotel was right next to Radom’s Jewish ghetto, and one day Irene witnessed a horrible sight. Jews in the ghetto—including pregnant women and children—were screaming, trying to run from SS officers who were chasing them down, trying to kill them. Then Irene saw one officer catch a mother holding an infant. With one movement of his hand, he pulled the baby away from its mother and threw it to the ground on its head.
Irene was horrified. She had been raised in a very sheltered, religious home and couldn’t understand how God could allow such terrible things to occur. She wanted to turn her back on God, to leave her faith. But then she realized something: God gives everyone a free will, to choose either good or evil. The Nazis had obviously chosen evil. What would her choice be?
Irene already knew the punishment for helping Jews. She had seen and heard the warning many times, on posters and loudspeakers broadcasting in the street: “Whoever helps a Jew shall be punished by death.” Irene made a decision. She told God that if she had an opportunity to help the Jews, she would, although it meant risking her own life. She began to sneak leftover food into the ghetto.
The German army was moving east, toward the Russian front, where the Germans were now battling the Soviets. The officers, the munitions factory, and Irene followed them to a large complex in Ternopol, Ukraine. Now, in addition to her dining room duties, Irene was to also oversee the laundry facility, which was staffed—as was the munitions factory—by Jews from the local arbeitslager, or work camp. The men and women who worked there soon came to trust Irene, and they told her all that they had suffered at the hands of a very cruel SS officer called Sturmbannfürer (the equivalent of an army major) Rokita, who was in charge of the arbeitslager. Irene was determined to help them in any way she could. One of them shrugged, “What can you do? You’re only a young girl.” Irene knew he was right, but she was determined to try anyway.
Since Sturmbannfürer Rokita ate his meals regularly in the dining room where Irene worked, she deliberately lingered over his table and was able to overhear discussions regarding raids on factories where Jewish workers would be killed. Irene would then convey this information to the Jews in the laundry room, who would in turn warn their friends in the factory. Many of them were able to escape into the woods and avoid being killed.
THE WEHRMACHT AND THE SS The Wehrmacht was the name of the regular German armed forces, while Schutzstaffel, or SS, was a separate, fanatical, extremely elite Nazi organization. Any German could be part of the Wehrmacht, either by enlistment or the draft, but to join the SS one had to undergo rigorous racial tests to prove Aryan credentials, sign an oath of personal loyalty to Hitler, and be a member of the Nazi party. Younger members of the SS had graduated from the Hitler Youth program, which indoctrinated German children with Nazi ideology at a young age. The SS had its own armed forces branch, called the Waffen SS, and an intelligence branch, called the Sicherheitsdienst, or SD. The primary responsibility of the SS was carrying out Hitler’s racial policies, which meant hunting down, imprisoning, and killing Jews. The SS also ran the concentration camps and was the organization most directly responsible for Nazi crimes against humanity committed during the war. Hitler distrusted the Wehrmacht leaders, but he needed them to run the war.
Major Rügemer and Sturmbannfürer Rokita were always arguing at the dinner table. Rügemer’s job was to keep the munitions factory running smoothly while Rokita’s job was to get rid of the Jews, the very workers from Rügemer’s factory. One day when she was waiting on the tables in the dining room, Irene overheard Rokita tell Rügemer that Ternopol was scheduled to be Judenrein (Jew-pure) by the end of July, less than a month away.
Irene knew that her friends were doomed—it would take a miracle to save them. About three days later, she got one. Rügemer called Irene into his office and told her that he was going to take a large house in town and wanted her to be his housekeeper there while maintaining her duties in the dining room and laundry facility. When she went to inspect Major Rügemer’s new villa, she discovered that the enormous basement had obviously been built as a servants’ quarters. And there was a large chute that ran from the basement to the outside for sliding in coal—or people. Irene concocted a desperate plan.
On the evening before Ternopol was to be made Judenrein, the German officers and their secretaries went to a party in town while specially trained SS teams searched every corner of the city for hidden Jews. Irene had hidden her friends in the laundry room. When the SS searchers had gone and before the others returned from the party, Irene sneaked her friends into the air duct inside Rügemer’s bathroom, where they remained all that night and the next day.
The following night, Rügemer, suffering from a hangover, asked Irene for a sleeping pill, which she gladly gave him. Then she led her friends out of the major’s bathroom and out the front door of the complex, with the address of the villa in their hands.
The next morning, Irene was relieved to find her friends hiding in the villa’s basement. They devised a warning system that involved Irene keeping the front door locked at all times so that when Major Rügemer came home, he couldn’t get in without Irene opening the door.
The 12 Jews hidden in Major Rügemer’s house were very comfortable, and Irene might have been amused at the irony of hiding Jews in the home of a German officer if it hadn’t been such a deadly game. She was reminded of that danger one day as she passed through the town square. A Jewish couple with a young child and a Polish couple with two small children were being pushed up the stairs to a gallows in the middle of the square. Everyone who was nearby was forced by German soldiers to watch the scene. Nooses were put around the necks of each person, children included, and all of them were hung. The Jewish family had been killed simply for being born Jewish. The Polish family had been killed for trying to hide them.
When Irene returned to the villa, still in shock from the grisly scene, she walked into the kitchen and was greeted by three of the Jewish women, who asked her what was wrong. Irene couldn’t speak. Her shock not only made her speechless, it also made her forget to lock the door behind her. Minutes later, Major Rügemer was standing in the kitchen, staring at Irene and the Jewish women. His face was trembling with rage. Then he strode into the library and slammed the door.
Irene followed him. “I trusted you!” he shouted. “How could you do this behind my back, in my own house? How? Why?”
Irene fell to the floor, sobbing at Rügemer’s feet and begging him not to turn in her friends.
Rügemer refused to listen. “No!” he shouted. “I am an old man. I have to go now. I’ll give you my decision when I return.”
Later that evening, Rügemer returned to the villa. He was drunk. He told Irene that he would keep her secret and that the three women (the only ones he knew about) could remain hidden in his house. But his silence would come with a price: Irene was to become his mistress and willingly share his bed.
Irene was shocked and humiliated. Not only was she extremely religious, and Rügemer an old man, but her only experience with men so far had been the horrendous rape by Soviet soldiers. However, she wouldn’t let innocent people die. Without telling her friends what their safety was costing her, Irene agreed to Major Rügemer’s demand.
This situation lasted for several months until the Soviet army pushed the Germans westward, back toward Germany, and everyone in Ternopol fled to avoid the approaching Soviet armies.
After parting from Rügemer and her Jewish friends, Irene found work as a courier for the Polish Home Army (the AK), which was fighting the enemies of Poland—the Germans and the Soviets—in any way it could. When the war was nearly over, Irene began to search for her family. She got as far as the Polish city of Kraków, where she was reunited with the Jews she had hidden. Then she was arrested by Soviet police, who accused Irene of being an AK leader; they interrogated her daily. She told them nothing about the Partisans. She escaped from the Soviet prison and, with the help of her Jewish friends, made it safely out of Poland. She eventually moved to the United States.
Irene didn’t talk about her wartime experiences for many years. Then, in 1975, she heard a neo-Nazi claim that the Holocaust was a hoax; that it had never happened. Irene realized she now had a responsibility: she began to travel widely in order to speak about what she had seen, eventually writing her story (with author Jennifer Armstrong), called In My Hands: Memoirs of a Holocaust Rescuer.
In 1982 the Jewish organization Yad Vashem recognized Irene as one of the Righteous Among the Nations. She was also given a papal blessing by Pope John Paul II in 1995. Irene died in 2003. In 2006 she was posthumously granted the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland.
LEARN MORE In My Hands: Memoirs of a Holocaust Rescuer by Irene Gut Opdyke with Jennifer Armstrong (Knopf, 1999).
“Irene Gut Opdyke”
www.achuka.co.uk/special/opdyke.htm
This Web site contains an interview with Irene.
Rescuers: Portraits of Moral Courage in the Holocaust by Gay Block and Malka Drucker (Holmes & Meier, 1992) contains a transcription of an interview with Irene.