In My Hands: Memories of a Holocaust Rescuer

by Irene Gut Opdyke

  “Dzien dobry, Pan Ridel.”

  He regarded me for a moment, then looked at his wife. I saw her give him a slight nod.

  Marek Ridel excused himself and left the kitchen. His wife turned the conversation to Poland, and what our country's fate would be with the Soviets, rather than the Germans, in control. We talked at length, as the patch of sunlight from the window moved across the brown linoleum floor. It seemed I had known her forever, and I found myself pouring out my heart to her, tearfully describing my sister Janina's voice, my mamusia's pierogis, the dusky, sweet smell of my father's pipe.

  “This is beautiful,” I murmured, reaching out to touch the embroidery on Pani Ridela's apron. “My mother had one like this.”

  “My mother gave me this one,” the older woman said. “It has become so threadbare, but I treasure it.”

  “I have nothing of my mother's. Nothing of my family's.” Pani Ridela covered my hand with hers, and I bent my head. I saw myself reflected on the back of my teaspoon; my image was distorted. I could not even find memories of my family in my own face. I had lost my family in order to care for my friends. And now that I was separated from even them, I was truly alone.

  Then Janek arrived.

  The door opened, and Marek Ridel entered the kitchen again, followed by a much younger man. “My son, Janek,” Pan Ridel announced.

  “I understand you're looking for me,” Janek said.

  I lost the power of speech for an instant. One moment, I had been utterly alone. The next moment, there was Janek.

  “I'm Mercedes-Benz,” he said, taking a seat across from me. “Welcome.”

  Love at first sight is a girl's dream. By March of 1944 I was almost twenty-two years old; I had long since stopped thinking of myself as a girl—and I had no faith in dreams. But suddenly, every sweet song I had ever heard made perfect sense to me. I loved Janek the way a priest loves God: without question. I followed him to the forest outside Kielce, where his group of partisans was. I followed him without question, and joined the partisans without question. I did it for Poland, yes. And I did it for me, because I had sworn to keep fighting the enemy. But even more, I did it for Janek.

  They gave me small jobs to begin with, to test my nerve and my loyalty. I tucked messages into the thick bun of hair at the back of my head and carried them between the partisans and their spies who worked for the Germans. Sometimes I carried packages of money, smuggled in from England to be used for guns or sent further up the line to another group.

  I never understood exactly where orders came from. I was never told more than I needed to know, and I did not urge Janek to tell me. It did seem to me that our partisan cell made its own plans and decisions, although we coordinated some of our efforts with other groups around the countryside. Mostly, however, our attacks were made as opportunity arose: When word reached us of something that we could exploit, we acted.

  Our enemies were the enemies of Poland—both the Germans and the Soviets—and everything we did was designed to antagonize them and drive them off. As the Germans retreated, the territory they abandoned was taken over by the Russians—sometimes the mounted Cossacks, whose raids among the villages were horrific. Stories and speculation flew. It was rumored that German officers, especially SS officers, were beginning to desert, to strip off their uniforms and insignia like so many snakes shedding their skins. Some, it was said, went so far as to wear the yellow Star of David and try to blend in among the Jewish freedom fighters, but they were easily tested for authenticity: None of them could recite from Torah. All over Poland, the forests echoed with executioners’ guns.

  I knew members of our fighting unit had assassinated Nazi officers, stolen weapons, made bombs, executed collaborators. I knew this. I understood that I was participating in death. I can't say how I reconciled it with everything I had done before, with all the pains I had taken to protect lives. But I did. From time to time, I would look across the campfire while we cooked our meager dinner in the forest. Perhaps I would see Jerzy spit on a whetstone and sharpen his knife— the knife he used to cut sausages—and know without being told that he had used the same knife on a man. Or I might see Aaron study the map of a nearby town, and know that he was planning a backstreet ambush. And the memory of a baby thrown into the air would flood my mind, hurtling me down into darkness, and I would think, Yes, sharpen your knife. Sharpen it. Lay your traps.

  This atmosphere of danger and defiance in which we existed made us alive like nothing else. We lived in the forest, and our senses were as sharp as wild animals‘. The biting smoke from our campfires, a glimpse of a bluebell in the woods, the sudden flicker of bird wings across our path, the voices of our friends singing patriotic songs—these things all struck us so intensely that we sometimes wept with emotion. We were very young. We were fighting for our country. We were in love.

  One day in early April, I was made an official member of the partisan group, in a ceremony in the forest. Father Tadeusz, a priest who was our ally, performed the ritual in the church of the trees. I swore a blood oath to protect my country, and the priest blessed me and christened me with my new partisan name, Mała, the Polish word for little. They decided I should not carry a gun because I went into town so often; I was given a capsule of poison, however, and I solemnly swore to kill myself if I was captured by the Germans or the Soviets.

  Afterward, Janek and I walked along a stream that was lined with yellow, starlike flowers. Sunlight glanced off the water onto Janek's face.

  “I know I should not be happy,” I admitted, twining my fingers through his. “Our country is still dominated by our enemies. My family is far away. And yet I am happy.”

  “Happy with me.” Janek turned me to face him, and put his hand under my chin. “Mała, my little bird, I know exactly what you are saying, because it is what is in my heart, too. I love you. I want to marry you.”

  I pressed my forehead against his heart. “I want to marry you, too.”

  We returned to Kielce that evening to tell his parents. The Ridels were overjoyed at our news, and urged us to set a date. We settled on May 5, my birthday, which was just under a month away. That evening, I could barely look at Janek across the dinner table: I was afraid that my emotions would overpower me if our eyes met. I had been accustomed to hiding my true feelings for a long time. It was hard to believe that I could be happy.

  Our group continued its guerrilla war as the spring turned green, but I took time out to indulge myself as a bride. On May 2, I was at the Ridels’ house, standing on a chair while Janek's mother pinned up the hem of my wedding dress.

  “You'll look like an angel, Irenka,” Pani Ridela exclaimed with a mouth full of pins. “Just like an angel.”

  Through the sheer curtains I saw Janek striding up the front steps; a moment later, the front door burst open and he charged in, catching me around the waist and swooping me off my perch.

  “Janek!” I screamed, beaming down at him and trying to push away. “I'm full of pins!”

  “It's bad luck to see the bride in her dress before the wedding,” his mother scolded.

  He put me down and swept my hair away from my face. “We don't care about superstitions, do we, darling? I had to see you!”

  “Why?” I laughed, blushing and smiling and fussing with my dress.

  “We just got word—a German transport is moving through the forest tonight. We're going to hit it. We need the ammunition. It'll be a sweet little liberation.”

  My stomach lurched. “Don't go, Janek. Let someone else do it.”

  “But, sweetheart! I'm the fearless leader,” he teased me. “I'll be back before morning. I'll bring you breakfast in bed,” he added, whispering in my ear.

  I giggled, but I was trying to be serious. “Janek, please! I don't want you to go.”

  “Sorry, my darling. It's all settled.” Janek was already on his way out the door. He stopped and blew me a kiss.

  And then he left.

  Janek was killed in the ambush. We bu
ried him in the forest.

  I wanted to die. Several times, I took the poison capsule from the little coin purse where I kept it. I would place it on the pillow of my bed in the Ridels’ house and rest my cheek beside it, looking at it. I only had to swallow it to be reunited with my love. That knowledge gave me the only peace I could find in those days.

  I returned to the forest, and Father Tadeusz talked with me day after day, bringing me step by step out of the darkness that clung to me. The notion of God's will had almost lost its meaning for me; I had seen so many people die during those war years. But this good priest reminded me time and again how often I had prevailed, how many times my luck had been almost miraculous; he reminded me that although many had died, many now lived because of me. That was God's will, Father Tadeusz told me. God has his reasons for everything, and we cannot know what those reasons might be.

  It was heartbreaking to think that God had his reasons for letting Janek die, heartbreaking to think that God had his reasons for showing me happiness and then snatching it away from me. I could not fully accept it. But I did not kill myself. After all, I reasoned, I was a guerrilla fighter and a spy. My life might end very soon without any encouragement from me.

  So I threw myself into my work for the partisans with even greater passion. I had lost all fear of death. I will not say I was reckless, but I had no hesitation. I was all over the countryside that spring and summer on my bicycle, delivering messages, delivering money. One afternoon, as I walked out of the forest, a German patrol stopped me and asked where I had come from. It was no effort at all to lie to them, to say that I had been afflicted by an “intestinal crisis,” and had run into the woods to relieve myself. They laughed so hard they only waved me on, not even bothering to ask for identification. Another time, as I wheeled my bicycle across a guarded bridge, an officer stopped me and flirted with me. I used my best German on him, flirting back, promising to return after I visited my mother. Meanwhile, a wrapped parcel containing thousands of British pounds lay in the basket between the handlebars. I played with my golden hair as we spoke, knowing that he would stare at it, and he never even noticed the parcel. On other occasions, when we had quantities of weapons or ammunition to deliver, several of us dressed ourselves in peasant clothes and drove a great hay wagon with the guns buried in the hay. If we were stopped and questioned, I always smiled at the officers, and they always smiled back. In my heart, I was seeing them dead. But on my face, I was an open invitation.

  If you are only a girl, this is how you destroy your enemies.

  Flight

  I lived this way through the summer and autumn, and by December, as 1944 was dying, I succumbed to pneumonia from camping in the forest and driving myself to exhaustion. Some of my friends took me into Kielce, to the Ridels‘. Janek's parents wept to see the condition I was in, and being together only reminded us of our loss. We mourned even as they nursed me back to life. I was very ill for three months, and when I finally recovered, I learned that all of Poland had been turned over to the Soviets. We had been “liberated,” whatever that meant.

  The Red Army was now pouring like a lava flow toward the heart of Germany. The Battle of Berlin pounded that city into ruins, and on April 30, 1945, Hitler killed himself in a bunker far below his blasted capital.

  Hitler was gone. The Nazis were gone. Poland was “free.” But I was tired. I had no more strength for fighting. I wanted my mother. It was time for me to start looking for my family.

  The Ridels begged me to stay with them, but they understood my longing. They scraped together as much cash as they could, and I left Kielce and its bittersweet memories behind me. As I began traveling across my battered country, I noticed signs posted everywhere in Russian and Polish urging the partisans to surrender. There was no longer any need to stay hidden; the guerrillas should hand over their weapons and return to society and be welcomed as heroes.

  I had not lived through six years of war to fall into such a blatant trap. I had no doubt that anyone so foolish as to turn himself in would be imprisoned or worse. I remember standing on a sidewalk reading such a notice on my birthday, on May 5. I was twenty-three, but I felt a million years old, and sometimes I was so tired I simply wanted to lie down on the street and never rise. Still, I had no intention of crossing paths with the Soviet Red Army again.

  So I kept my head down. Travel was difficult: The roads and railways had all been damaged by war, and getting from one city to another could take days instead of hours. There were hostels available—everyone was on the move—and finding a place to spend the night was not so hard. Often I simply slept on a bench, in a train station, in a park. As I crossed the landscape, seeing my country in shambles, I began to understand more fully what had been done to Poland. Word spread about what the Allies were finding in the countryside, about the scale of the Nazis’ extermination camps. So many little towns had been defiled by the Nazis: Oświęcim would be forever cursed as Auschwitz; Rogoźnica would be remembered as Gross-Rosen; Sztutowo would be hated as Stutthof; and the towns of Treblinka, Belźec, and Sobibór had not even a Nazi-given German name to hide behind. Poland had been turned into the land of death. We who traveled across it in those days felt that we walked on graves wherever we stepped.

  I first went to Radom, which was only 80 kilometers from Kielce. I was overjoyed to find my aunt Helen; she had remarried, and was content to start anew in Radom. But my joy quickly turned to disappointment: She had heard nothing from my family since sending Janina back to them. She was convinced they were no longer in Kozłowa Góra. Now I did not know where to turn.

  I did learn something encouraging, however. By visiting the resurrected synagogues in Radom, I learned that many Jews from the Ternopol area had migrated to Kraków. With so many lives disrupted, the ghostly survivors were drifting to the great cities, hoping to find their lost loved ones congregating there as well.

  And so I went south to Kraków, back through Kielce again. I wanted to find my friends, if possible, before I continued west in search of my family. Perhaps I was afraid of the inevitable truth: that I would not find my family. So I haunted the temples and synagogues of Kraków, reciting names: Haller, Silberman, Wilner, Bauer, Weiss. At last I was rewarded: I found Fanka.

  She was working for a tailor. When I entered the workshop, she was bent over an old army coat in her lap, ripping the seams apart with a little knife. My breath stuck in my throat.

  “Fanka,” I whispered.

  She glanced up, puzzled, and then sprang from her chair, dropping the coat and knife. There was a moment when we only stared, and then we were clinging together, weeping and laughing. “Irene, Irene,” she gasped, clutching the fabric of my dress in her fists as she pressed me against her. I could not speak at all.

  At last, when we were able to compose ourselves, we sat at Fanka's worktable and tried to catch up with our news, interrupting each other, laughing from sheer giddiness—and, when I told her of my lost love, crying a bit together.

  “And truly, everyone else is here?” I asked, holding her hands in mine.

  She smiled. “Well, most of us—we are practically a club. The Morrises, of course; Rosen; the Bauers, too, although I think they will return to Germany. And Wilner is here,” she added.

  I squeezed her hands. “Do you know, I always thought he liked you?”

  Fanka blushed. “Maybe he does.”

  I couldn't help laughing. “We'll see. And Ida and Lazar? Please tell me—the baby?”

  “The baby was born at Pasiewski's. It's a boy, fine and healthy. His name is Roman.”

  This news hit me like an electrical shock. I felt—I felt as though that baby were my baby, and that all I had endured was for his sake. Through all the dreadful things that had happened, I had brought forth this baby. I had to thank God. I could not do otherwise.

  “I have to see him. Where do they live?”

  Fanka's smile faded. “Oh, I'm sorry, Irene. They're not in Kraków. They're in Katowice.”

 
; I chewed my lip, thinking. “That's only about sixty kilometers from here, isn't it?”

  “Yes—but you'll stay for a while, won't you, Irene?” Fanka pleaded. “Don't leave us so soon. Everyone will want to see you. And you look so tired.”

  “I have been sick,” I admitted, suddenly noticing how weak I felt. The excitement of seeing Fanka had drained me. “I'll stay awhile, but then I want to see the baby, and find my own family.”

  Fanka leaned forward to kiss my cheek. “I know, Irene. I understand. We'll help you—you know we will.”

  The next few days were filled with reunions, as I met up with one old friend after another. I felt like a mother hen who finally has all her chicks together again, and I would look around the dinner table with a delighted grin on my face. They fussed over me and spoiled me as much as they could, calling me their savior, their deliverer, showing me off to their new friends. When I finally, reluctantly, said I must resume my journey, they gave me a purse of money to help me on my travels.

  Only sixty kilometers from Kraków to Katowice—and yet it took two days to get there, through endless delays and detours. Finally, I made my way to a temple and asked the rabbi if he knew Ida and Lazar. At first, he greeted me with cold suspicion: I looked so German. But the moment I gave my name, he let out a shout of amazement and threw his arms around me. “You are Irene! Of course I know who you are!” And he led me outside, pointing out the way to the Hallers‘. Once I had their address, I wasted no time in hurrying there. My mind was racing with excitement, and so many dreams of their baby's future filled my head that I noticed nothing around me.

  That is why I did not see the two Soviet military policemen who had been following me. I was caught completely off guard when I was arrested.

  Perhaps I should have put the Kielce area far behind me, because our partisan group had operated all over that part of southern Poland. But the lure of seeing that baby boy was too much for me to resist. As it was, for someone whose name meant little, Mała had a big reputation from Kielce to Kraków. Not only was I recognized, I was suspected of being the leader of the partisans!