In My Hands: Memories of a Holocaust Rescuer

by Irene Gut Opdyke

  “Irena Gutowna.”

  “Your age?”

  “Seventeen.”

  “Why were you in the forest?”

  As I answered, he translated into Russian for the woman beside him. “I was with the Polish medical corps. We—we went into the forest when we learned that Poland had been…that Poland was divided. We were trying to stay alive.”

  Dr. Pavlovskaya watched me intently as I spoke, a small frown creasing the skin between her eyebrows. She spoke in Russian.

  “Are you a nurse?” the interpreter asked.

  I stared at the ceiling again. I had deserted my post; my compatriots were gone, and now my body hurt everywhere. The memory of the soldiers’ attack came over me in waves, and tears rolled down the sides of my face.

  Again, “Are you a nurse?”

  “I'm a student nurse,” I whispered.

  After the man spoke to Dr. Pavlovskaya, we were all silent for a moment, listening to the storm shake the building. Sleet rattled suddenly against the window like a handful of tiny bones. Then the doctor picked up my chart, read it over quickly, and spoke to the interpreter.

  “There is no permanent damage, although it will take you some time to heal. You're malnourished and run-down, but I think within a few days you will be well enough to perform some light duties in the hospital. We are short-staffed now. I'll get you a hospital uniform when you are feeling better.”

  I felt heavy and dull. The interpreter's voice faded as I fell into sleep. “Where am I?” I tried to ask, but no words came out and I was gone.

  Dr. Pavlovskaya was there when I woke again the following afternoon. When she noticed me watching her, she gave me a swift, friendly smile, and spoke in Russian. Then she brushed my hair back from my face and took my wrist to check my pulse, murmuring a word that sounded like “bird.” I closed my eyes, grateful for the kindness. Her hands were cool and soft. Then she left, and a nurse came to my bed with a basin and a clean hospital gown. I pulled myself painfully up in bed, holding myself like a sheet of glass. I swung my legs over the side, and my knees trembled when I stood, but I shook my head when the nurse offered to help me. I turned away to hide my bruised body from her gaze, and washed quickly, trying not to look, myself. Then I dressed myself in the gown, and she motioned for me to follow her.

  She led me down a long corridor in the hospital. It was filled with the familiar scents of chloroform and sickness. At a nurses’ station, two women bickered over a chart, and then stared at me curiously as I passed. A cold draft blew across my ankles as I followed the nurse to a separate wing. Signs in Russian were posted on every door, and a photograph of Joseph Stalin brooded at the end of the corridor.

  The rooms of the nurses’ dormitory were all in a line, with a door on each end, making it necessary to walk through one room to get to another. We entered a room with three beds, and the nurse indicated the one that was mine. I sat uncertainly on the edge, and without further explanation, she left the way we had come.

  I sat, trembling slightly with cold and with nervousness. Under the other two beds were trunks. A sweater was tossed over one of the beds, and a magazine lay facedown on the other. Still trembling, I crawled under the covers and rolled into a ball, hugging my knees to my chest. I wanted to sleep, to forget. I slept, but I could not forget.

  I met my roommates the next day. They came in together, chatting tiredly, as though they had just gone off shift. One was tall, black-haired, and delicate. The other was coarser, with strong features. They sat on their beds and looked at me while they changed out of their uniforms.

  The shorter one spoke in a loud, impatient voice; pointing to herself, she said, “Galla,” and then, pointing at the taller girl, “Maruszka.”

  “Irena,” I whispered.

  They continued to talk, and once in a while, a word sounded familiar, close to a Polish word, and that began my education in Russian. I spent a few more days recovering and picking up bits of Russian from my roommates, and from then on, I was thrown into hospital work, often working alongside Galla and Maruszka. We started with common hospital words—bed, dressing, thermometer, blood—and went on with verbs, numbers, adjectives. In the dining hall that echoed with voices, I learned the names for fork, knife, potato, bread, tea, table. Within a few days, I was stumbling through short sentences in Russian, and Maruszka patiently read me the Moscow newspapers, simplifying the language as she went.

  The papers trumpeted the Red Army's iron-fisted campaign on the Finnish border and its triumph over the Polish resistance. I listened mutely to the reports about the defeated Polish army. I could not bear to think about it. I tried not to think about my family, or about my beloved Poland, invaded from both sides. Many evenings, we all sat in the lecture hall listening to propaganda speeches that boasted of the virtues and victories of Communism. Maruszka would explain the difficult parts for me, describing how millions of Americans were dying of hunger in the streets, ignored by a heartless capitalist government. Naive as I was, I still understood that we were being fed the Marxist line, and though I didn't believe half of what I heard, my mind was busy, struggling to listen and understand.

  But nights were hard. Often, in the adjoining rooms, someone would be having a party, and the smell of cigarettes and the sound of loud laughter and the clinking of glasses would keep me awake, staring at the ceiling, trying not to cry from loneliness and anxiety. Ojcze nasz, Który jestes w niebie, I prayed, święć się Imigę Twoje. I wondered if the Heavenly Father saw me, alone and defeated. By day I worked in the wards, relearning procedures I had studied in Radom and trying to ignore the fact that I was a prisoner.

  “You are making excellent progress,” Dr. Pavlovskaya said to me one day.

  “Thank you, Dr. Olga,” I replied. “Maruszka has been a very good teacher.”

  The doctor nodded. She had checked on me frequently, and was always pleased with my work in the hospital and with my efforts to learn Russian. As head of the hospital, her duties were largely administrative, but she kept an eye on me, all the same.

  More than Dr. Olga, I saw Dr. David, a Ukrainian Pole who was head of surgery. He was kind, but demanded the best care for his patients. I was eager to do well for him. It was Dr. David who eventually told me where we were: Ternopol, about one hundred kilometers east of Lvov in the Ukraine. I was still in Poland that was not Poland, but I might as well have been in Moscow: I was far, far away from my family, with no way to return to them, or to hear their voices or to see their familiar handwriting on a letter, no way to let them know where I was or even that I was alive.

  The weeks went by, and the months, as my Russian improved and my health returned. Dr. Olga was transferred to the Finnish front, along with Galla and Maruszka, and was replaced in March by a new administrator, Dr. Ksydzof. He was a bitter, sneering man who had suffered some accident in his youth which had left him with a twisted leg that made him limp. Whenever he saw me, he seemed to glare at me with some special hatred. Nothing passed his lips but harsh criticism and complaints about the staff, and soon everyone in the hospital came to despise and fear him.

  Under his administration, the Communist propaganda lectures intensified. Almost every night, we were herded into the lecture hall to applaud the latest conquests of the Red Army, which was “liberating” all of eastern Poland. I had no doubt that all of my compatriots from the forest had been killed, and I began to suspect that Dr. Ksydzof intended to bring my stay at the Ternopol hospital to a swift and unpleasant end. Under Dr. Olga's authority, I had known I was a prisoner, but I had felt safe. Now, as a nurse of the renegade Polish army, I knew I attracted Dr. Ksydzof s personal vengeance.

  And yet I did not suspect how it would happen. One night, dead tired from a twenty-four-hour shift, I was awakened by a weight sinking onto my bed beside me, and I was overwhelmed by the stink of stale cigar smoke and vodka. Hands began groping me, and clamped my mouth shut as I began to fight.

  “Shut up, you Polish bitch!” a harsh voice growled. “You'r
e mine now.”

  I knew it was Dr. Ksydzof. Everything in me recoiled with disgust and horror, and I flailed out, trying to shove him off me. My hand struck the heavy glass bottle of cold tea that I kept on a chair beside the bed, and without thinking, I gripped it by its neck and swung it as hard as I could, smashing it on his head. He went limp, and I struggled out from under him, soaked—with tea, with blood, I wasn't sure.

  “Panie Jezul Lord Jesus, I've killed him!” I moaned.

  In a panic, I ran from the room in my nightgown, the tiled floor cold on my bare feet. I ran blindly to the emergency room, where I found Dr. David sitting alone at the nurses’ station, reading a chart.

  “Help me! I've killed him! What will happen to me?”

  He shoved his chair back and jumped to his feet, gripping my arms. “Irushka, what is it? Who have you killed?”

  I was panting, sobbing, and I shook my head in despair. “I'll be arrested, they'll execute me! He attacked me while I was sleeping and I killed him!”

  Dr. David turned away and rummaged in a closet for a blanket, which he wrapped around me. “Stay here,” he said, leading me to a bed in a nearby room. He sat me down and tucked the blanket under my knees as I sobbed. “Try to calm down. We'll figure out what happened.”

  When he left I huddled on the bed, rocking myself back and forth, gulping down my tears. He was gone for several minutes, and when he came back, he looked tired.

  “Whoever it was is gone—you certainly didn't kill him.”

  I stared up at him. “It was Dr. Ksydzof,” I whispered.

  Dr. David let out a long, slow breath. “You have an enemy now, for sure. But I don't think he'll bring charges. How would it look for him? He attacked you in your bed.”

  He sat beside me, patting my knee. He was kind, and in spite of the way I had been abused by men, I trusted him.

  “Let me think about what to do with you,” he continued gently. “I'd like to get you away from here—”

  “Yes! I could go home!”

  “No, Irushka. I don't think it's possible to go west yet. But I have some friends….”

  My disappointment forced fresh tears from my eyes. “I want to go home,” I said miserably. “I want my mother.”

  “I'm sorry.” Dr. David stood up, easing his back. “Stay here tonight. Tomorrow we'll try to come up with something. I think you're safe from Dr. Ksydzof for a while.”

  I had little hope of that, but in fact, Dr. David was right. No mention was ever made of the incident; it was as though it had never happened. For the next few days, I tried to keep clear of the administrator. But when I did run into him, the looks he gave me squeezed my heart like a fist. He was certainly waiting for an opportunity to punish me, and I did not know how long I had. Every time I saw Dr. David, I wanted to plead with him for news, but there were always other people around, so it was impossible to talk privately.

  At last, the chance came. I was able to get away to Dr. David's office, and he checked the hallway before closing the door.

  “I have a friend, a woman I went to medical school with. She lives in Svetlana, near Kiev. It's a tiny village. She runs the local infirmary; I've told her that you are a good nurse, and what your story is. She'll take you in. But getting you out will be a problem. I can't forge a permit for you.”

  “I'll find a way,” I promised. “I have to get away from here.”

  I slipped out of his office and hurried back to my work. Over the next few days, I began studying the hospital grounds for a way out. The gates were guarded by soldiers, and there was no way through them without a permit. But as I strode back and forth across the yard, swinging my arms as though getting exercise, I noticed a loose board in the fence. I bent down to tie my shoe, and studied the board. The opening was narrow, but I was so thin I knew I could squeeze through it. The next time I saw Dr. David alone, I told him I had a way out.

  “Don't tell me the details. It's better I don't know,” he said quietly. He held up an X ray in front of us, as though showing it to me. It shielded us from passing eyes. “I'll get you a train ticket and my friend's address in Svetlana. We have a shift together tomorrow. I'll give it to you then.”

  We were both looking at the X ray, doctor and nurse conferring about a patient. I breathed out slowly, as though I had been holding my breath for days. “Thank you, Doctor.”

  “Good luck, Irushka. Be careful.”

  Svetlana Year

  It was the middle of March when I left Ternopol. Dirty snow lay in banks on the shady side of the street as I made my way to the train station, early in the morning as the sun rose. Because I had snuck out after my shift had ended, I knew I would not be missed for several hours. Nobody took any notice of me on the street—I was only one of many hurrying to work or to buy food for the family table. Two Russian soldiers carved themselves thin slices of sausage as they leaned against a boarded-up kiosk in the station; they barely glanced my way when I walked past them and swung up onto the train. The mighty Red Army was too busy with breakfast to pay attention to me, and I slipped through their net as easily as smoke.

  I found a compartment; I traveled east. The train huffed over muddy, half-thawed farmland, rutted deep by wagon wheels. Dark wooden church spires stuck up on the flat horizon, and along the streams stood naked willows. Cinders from the train's smokestack flew backward in a gray cloud. All day long we moved across the countryside, stopping from time to time at a town or village depot. Once, in the distance, I saw an ant line of Red Army trucks crawling westward. I never moved from my seat, but sat with my hands in my lap, keeping small.

  At last we crossed the mighty Dnieper River and stopped for some time at Kiev. The station was a mass of soldiers in Red Army uniforms, but I sat as still as a woodcock in a thorn bush, and no one saw me in my camouflage. Cars were shunted away; the train jerked as other cars were attached; huge gasps of steam boiled out from under the carriage, and a conductor shouted out the names of the stops on the west-east line.

  Then we were gone, and the onion domes and gilded spires of Kiev fell away behind us. A group of soldiers, drunk and noisy, had boarded the train and were stumbling down the passage, looking for pretty girls and singing a dirty song about mules, roughhousing as they came. I pulled my scarf around me and kept my face toward the window. My feet were cold, and my stomach grumbled like an old dog. As darkness began to fall, we slowed for a tiny provincial train station, and a conductor called out, “Svetlana.”

  I fumbled the compartment door open and stepped down onto the platform, almost tripping in my hurry.

  “Rachel! It's me, Miriam!”

  Strong arms caught me from behind and whirled me around. I stared at a young woman with dark, curling hair peeking out from under a shawl, and she met my gaze. “It's so good to have you here, Cousin,” she said firmly. “Little Rachel Meyer, how you've grown since I last saw you!”

  “Oh, yes,” I stammered.

  “Now,” Miriam continued, tucking my arm into hers and shepherding me into the station, “I know you're tired, so no talk—we'll get home and get you settled. Good night, Comrade,” she said to the man nodding behind the ticket window.

  He waved one hand sleepily, not even looking up. “Good night.”

  Then we were on the muddy street, where the twilight was turning everything gray. We walked quickly, not speaking, past two old gray women bundled up in gray scarves, and when we were alone, I got up the courage to speak.

  “Dr. David said—I thank you so much for taking me in,” I faltered. “I didn't know what else to do.”

  “It's best if you do not speak too much at first,” my new cousin said gently. “Your accent is a tiny bit off. Let me do the talking for a little while, anyway. We'll have to register you with the district magistrate tomorrow. Remember, you are my cousin, Rachel Meyer from Ludmilla, near Lvov. Tonight you will practice writing your name so that it comes easily to you.”

  She unlocked the door of a little house attached to a clinic, and then
we were inside in the warmth and light. Miriam unwrapped her scarf and shook her hair out as she looked at me.

  “So. You are here. I'll take care of you until we can get you home.”

  I walked slowly around the single downstairs room of the cottage. Medical books lay open on a table, and a pot was bubbling on the stove. The house had a cozy, familiar smell of antiseptics, wood smoke, and violet perfume. For the first time in many months, I began to relax. Someone was taking care of me. Those words were a blessing to my poor, lonely heart.

  While Miriam and I waited for our dinner to finish cooking, we sat with our feet up on the fender of the stove, toasting our soles and getting acquainted. Then, as we ate dinner—cabbage soup, hot brown bread, fresh milk, and pickled onions—we concocted the details of Rachel Meyer's life, and gradually, the terrible things that had happened to Irena Gutowna began to seem like events in someone else's past. Late that night, there in eastern Ukraine on the broad plain of sleeping wheat fields, I went to sleep as Irena; when I awoke, I was Rachel.

  My new life began first thing in the morning, when a young boy was brought into the infirmary with a broken leg. He had fallen while helping to repair the roof of his family's home. Miriam set the bones and I helped her to put a cast on the boy's leg. He was a pale, underfed boy, and he watched us silently. When the father came to carry the boy home, he brought with him a fresh-killed chicken as payment. He laid it on the infirmary table, where it bled on the white enamel.

  Over the next several weeks, we were kept busy with the accidents and illnesses of the people of Svetlana. Men got drunk and fought, and we tended them. Women bore children, and we helped their births. The children in the local school needed vaccinations, the old, weathered men and women needed relief from their rheumatism, or needed a tooth pulled or an abscess lanced. We were paid in blood sausages, plucked chickens, creamy milk, dusty bread, honeycombs with dead bees stuck in the wax, labor on demand—everything but money. I kept the medicines in order, I sterilized instruments, I rolled bandages. Miriam was an excellent doctor, and every moment I worked with her I learned something new.