In My Hands: Memories of a Holocaust Rescuer

by Irene Gut Opdyke

  The interrogations went on for days. Often, when I had been taken back to my cell and had fallen asleep, I would be dragged awake for more questioning. I denied everything. I had been well schooled in deception, and the Soviets got nothing about the partisans from me. Since my interrogation in Ternopol so long ago, I had become a champion liar, and I thought I could hold out against these new questions.

  All I told them, over and over, was my name, my hometown, and the story of my cruel enslavement by the Nazis— of the destruction of my honor when I was made the concubine of a German officer. Every indignity, real and imagined, that could befall a poor helpless Polish girl at the hands of the wicked Germans: This was the story I poured out to the liberators of my homeland. I swear, no actress could have put on a more convincing show of wronged innocence and ignorance than I.

  And yet they were not convinced.

  Day after day went by in this way, and I began to despair; perhaps my miraculous luck had at last run out. Then, for no reason that I could understand, they decided that I needed a new kind of humiliation. I was made to work during the day, scrubbing floors and cleaning toilets, while my nightly interrogations continued. I was exhausted. If I had still had my poison capsule, I might have used it. I was afraid I would grow too confused, and be unable to keep up my pretense, and that I would endanger my comrades.

  “Who were the other partisan leaders?”

  “Where are they now?”

  “How did you communicate with London?”

  “How many did you command?”

  “How many weapons do you have stockpiled?”

  “What acts of sabotage are you planning against your liberators?”

  “What are the names of the other partisan leaders?”

  I concentrated on a picture in my head: Not one of Ma-musia or Tatuś—their faces brought tears and made me weak, as did the faces of my sisters. Not one of Janek—no, not Janek. I pictured Bociek, the stork we had rescued as little girls, that wild, mysterious, frightening bird. Even wounded he was formidable, jabbing with his dagger beak, his shiny, black eyes blinking at us in defiance. We kept him in our cellar all winter, feeding him frogs, fish, mice—anything — and hoping to tame him. But he would not be tamed. When spring arrived and his wing was healed, he flew away the moment we opened the door and did not return.

  “Who is Bociek?” my interrogator asked quietly.

  I was alarmed. I did not realize I had spoken aloud, but when he leaned forward, eager, and asked again who Bociek was, I could not stifle a small laugh.

  “He was a stork,” I said, feeling renewed strength as I giggled. “We found him with a broken wing and we made him better. Mean old Bociek. He stabbed my hand with his beak once. I thought it would get infected, but it didn't. You see?” I held out my hand; it didn't even tremble.

  “Take her away,” the man said in disgust.

  Luck was with me still. One morning, I was taken to the second floor of a wing of the prison. I noticed that the bars on the hallway windows were spaced far enough apart for someone as small as I was to squeeze through. I was told to enter a particular room to clean it, but when I went in, I found ten or fifteen men—guards, I suppose—in the process of getting dressed. They looked around at me in surprise as I let out a gasp.

  I flung my bucket and mop down, furious and embarrassed, and ran out of the room. As the door slammed shut behind me, I found myself in the hallway—alone—beside an open window. Without thinking, I hoisted myself up onto the sill, squirmed between the bars, and dangled for a moment, gripping the clammy iron rails between my hands. And then I let go.

  By the time I'd limped my way to the Hallers’ apartment building, my feet were swollen like melons. I knew I had not broken any bones—thank God—but I must have broken several blood vessels when I landed. I had run on adrenaline, searching for the Hallers’ street. “Find Ida,” a voice whispered to me. “Find Ida.”

  I propped myself up in the doorway, examining the list of names alongside the buzzers. My hand shook as I reached out to touch the button labeled “Haller,” and as I waited I squeezed my eyes shut and breathed shallowly, trying to master the pain in my feet and ankles. From somewhere nearby came the sound of a piano. Chopin.

  At the sound of footsteps from the foyer, my eyes flew open. The door handle rattled, and I was staring at a Russian uniform.

  “I—I am looking for the Hallers,” I mumbled, darting a frantic look to the street for an escape route.

  “Are you Irene?”

  I stared at the soldier. “What?”

  “I'm Finix, Haller's brother-in-law. Don't be misled by the uniform. I wore it to fight Germans. Come in.”

  I tried to take a step, but my knees buckled. Finix picked me up as easily as if lifting a cat, and carried me into the building. Stars swam around my vision as my feet banged against the door frame. For a moment, I thought I would faint.

  “We heard you'd been arrested—the rabbi told us you were on your way here, but when you didn't show up, we asked around. How did you get free?” he asked.

  We were going down into the basement. The stairs were lit by a weak bulb. “I jumped from a window—that's how I hurt my feet,” I whispered. “Are Ida and Lazar here?”

  “Yes. You'll be safe down here for a moment while I get Ida,” Finix said, setting me down and propping me against the wall like a rag doll.

  I looked around me in wonderment as he went back upstairs. I was being hidden—in a basement laundry room! I had time to hobble to the sink, where I was able to hitch myself up off my feet. Then I heard footsteps clattering down the stairs, and Ida ran toward me.

  “Irene! My dear! I'm so glad you're safe!” she cried, wrapping her arms around me and holding me tight.

  I held her just as tight, pressing my face into her shoulder. “Must we always meet in cellars, Ida?” I don't know if I was laughing or crying.

  “Oh, Irene! God must have his jokes.” She, too, was laughing—or crying.

  “Ida! I had to see you and Lazar and your baby, but the Russians…”

  “I know, Irene. We have to get you away from here right away. To Kraków… Finix is bringing a car. He'll take you somewhere safe.”

  I pushed back so that I could look into her face. “But your baby, Ida. Can't I see him before I go? Is he healthy and strong?”

  Her face crumpled. “Irene, every night I ask God to bless you for making me keep my baby.”

  “But can I see him?”

  “If we have time,” Ida said, glancing at the doorway. “How are you?”

  “I'm alive. I'm here.”

  She winced. “Yes. A complicated question, perhaps. But—”

  Finix stuck his head into the laundry room. “Ready?”

  My heart sank. Even as Finix came to pick me up again, I grasped Ida's hand.

  “God blessed you with a family. Help me find mine, now,” I begged. “They were living in Kozłowa Góra, in Ober-schlesien. Can you help me? I won't be able to travel freely if the Russians—”

  “Anything, Irene. We'll find them.” Ida kissed me one more time, and then Finix carried me back upstairs, out the door, and into the backseat of a car, where he covered me with a blanket.

  I recuperated for two weeks in the care of Moise Lifshitz and his wife, Pola. They told me they had been in the Ternopol ghetto, and had escaped after one of my early warnings; now they were anxious to repay me. Word from Katowice was that I was wanted by the Soviets as a dangerous criminal, and was being hunted throughout the area.

  Meanwhile, the grapevine of Jewish survivors who were putting their lives back together was busy on my behalf, asking friends, who asked other friends—these questions found answers that nearly killed me. The first was the news that my father had been killed by the Germans several months earlier, shot for failing to step off the sidewalk at the approach of two drunken soldiers. And on top of this, I learned that my mother and sisters had been arrested by the Soviet secret police because of me, the dangerous f
ugitive partisan. I had kept my partisan friends safe, only to bring danger to my family.

  I lay in my bed, staring at the ceiling for hours, as tears ran down past my temples and soaked the pillowcase. For years, I had kept myself going with the hope that someday I would be reunited with my family. Now even that hope had been taken from me. I had brought the loss on myself.

  Sometimes, while I looked dazedly at shadows in the corners of my room, I could not believe that I was still alive. Not that I had survived so many physical dangers, but that I had taken so many wounds to my heart and was still living. I was ready to turn myself in, to exchange myself for my family, but more news reached us: My family had been released, and had gone into hiding. No one knew where they were. Their only safety lay in disappearing. I could not seek them out without putting them in danger again. I had to give up my search.

  There was nothing for me in Poland now. But where could I go? I was at a loss: I was finished with fighting, but I had forgotten how to do anything else. For many months, my friends sheltered me in one place or another—they let me heal, let me gather my strength. But my idleness was terrible, because it gave me time to think, to remember. And always, there was this question: Where could I live without fear?

  On German Soil

  My friends gave testimony on my behalf to their rabbi. A copy of this document remained with the Jewish Historical Committee in Kraków, and the other was given to me as my passport to a new life, whatever that was to be. I had no idea what to do or where to go, and whole days would pass when I could not shake myself from the fog that clouded me. I did not know Irene.

  At last, it was my friends who took charge of me, who made me one of them and then sent me onward. They knew the Allies were creating repatriation camps for displaced persons all over Europe. For millions of people uprooted from their homes, whose towns had been destroyed, whose lives were blown to the four winds, these camps were a refuge. Food, shelter, medical care were there in abundance; schools and loving attention for orphans; immigration officials to assist people in finding new homes across the seas. The camps were for Poles and Hungarians, Latvians and Italians, Ukrainians, Gypsies, Serbs, Dutch, for all the displaced people of Europe—but most of all for the Jews. The shattered, the hunted, the haunted Jews. I would be one of them.

  We dyed my hair black. My friends gave me a transit pass with a Jewish alias, Sonia Sofierstein, and put a ticket in my trembling hand. And then I boarded a train for Hessich-Lichtenau, Germany. To seek shelter in Germany, disguised as a Jew, was only one more bizarre irony. I had grown accustomed to this strange sense of humor fate showed me.

  There had once been a time—in my girlhood—when riding in a train was a happy adventure, when I would watch my fellow passengers and try to imagine the reasons for their journeys—to show a new baby to the grandmother, to meet a fiancé's parents, to enter university, to go on holiday, to go home. Now, on a train that click-clacked over the trestles and made the black pine boughs sway and shudder, it was impossible to imagine such things. We were all escaping.

  I asked myself what I was escaping from. Not just the Russians; no, it was more than that. Sometimes—maybe when I turned my head just so and caught a glimpse of something as the train rushed through the wooded landscape—sometimes I saw a baby being thrown into the air and shot like a bird. When this happened, my heart would pound in my chest and a scream would rise in my throat and I would cry out to myself Will I see this forever? Will I ever escape this vision?

  I saw this same question in the faces of the people who shared my compartment on the train. Their deathly stares, their pallor, their painful thinness, their silence—these were the evidence. It must be that each of them relived one scene over and over, just as I did: the moment a body fell to the ground; the moment an aged parent was sacrificed; a moment of betrayal, a moment of dreadful understanding. We were all doomed to remember.

  I watched through the window as the scenery fled past me. It was May 1946. Another birthday had come and gone, and nearly seven years had passed since my happy world had ended. Where was I headed? Where could I land?

  My arrival at the DP camp in Hessich-Lichtenau did not provide an answer, as I had hoped. Everyone there was turned inward. Some seemed sedated, like sleepwalkers. Children played only quiet games and moved in silent packs, like animals on the prowl. They had grown up in a universe that did not make sense, and some of them were almost completely feral. They mistrusted any tenderness.

  Once I had identified myself to the rabbi, shown my documents from the Jewish Historical Committee, I was welcomed as a hero and could shed my alias. I was anxious to be useful, to find a place where I fit in. I began to work in the camp infirmary, struggling to recall the rudimentary lessons from my distant nursing-school days. I was busy. I made friends. I fooled myself that I belonged.

  A group of young, strong people, men and women, arrived at our camp. They were outdoor people, tanned and fit, who spoke Hebrew with their own accent. They were Jews from Palestine, and they called themselves Israelis. Their organization was called the Haganah. “Come, fight for Israel, a new state,” they said, touching people on the shoulder, pointing toward the southeast.

  But before I could decide if Israel was the place for me, I succumbed to diphtheria. Once again, I was sick for many weeks, and my recovery took months. When I was well again, the doctors told me that the disease had changed the rhythm of my heart. I was unfit for Israel. The Haganah needed strong bodies, and now I was useless to them. In my weakness, I would hear the young survivors at their Hebrew lessons and be filled with despair.

  Somehow, months went by. I had been well over a year at the camp. All around me, people were coming back to life. The beauty of the countryside healed our spirits even as our bodies grew stronger. Our camp in Hessich-Lichtenau was a community of survivors. Our holidays became more joyous. People laughed. Many moved on—to Palestine, back to their home countries.

  I had made a place for myself in the village, and I lived there for three years. But still, it did not feel like home. And then, in the summer of 1949, a delegation from the United Nations arrived to interview survivors. Rabbi Stern found me in my room, reading a letter from Ida.

  “Irena, there's someone here I think you should talk to. I think he'll be interested in your story.”

  I folded the letter back into its envelope and followed the rabbi to the dining hall. There, a tall man in horn-rimmed glasses sat at a table, a briefcase open before him. The rabbi waved me forward. “Irena Gutowna; William Opdyke,” he said with a nod toward the U.N. delegate.

  Mr. Opdyke smiled as he rose, and held out a chair for me. I sat opposite him, watching Rabbi Stern as he left the room.

  “Hello. How do you do?” Opdyke said. He spoke in English.

  “Dzien dobry. Czy pan mówi po polsku?” Do you speak Polish? I asked.

  “Hmm. Parlez-vous français?”

  I shook my head. “Sprechen Sie Deutsch?” I tried.

  He shook his head. I tried Russian. I tried Yiddish. We had six languages between us, but not one in common— except the language of laughter. We could not help chuckling at the predicament we were in. He called across the room to a colleague, and in a few moments we had another American with us, one who spoke German.

  Through the interpreter, I told Mr. Opdyke my story. He interrupted a few times to ask questions, but for the most part he let me tell my story as the details came to me. Some of it was out of order, sometimes I had to pause to collect myself, but by the end of an hour, I had told him the essential elements. I left nothing out—I think I wanted to shock him, to tell this well-fed American what a simple Polish girl was capable of.

  Opdyke had been taking notes, but he finally just put his pen down and stared at me. For a moment, I feared that he did not believe what I had told him. He said something to the interpreter in a gruff voice.

  “Mr. Opdyke says he feels honored to have met you, and that the United States would be proud to have you as a
citizen.”

  “Me? America?”

  Opdyke extended his hand, and I shook it, while we both nodded solemnly at one another. “America,” he repeated.

  America.

  Amber

  What had happened to me through those years? How had Irena Gutowna become that person? Like a fledgling pushed from its nest, I had been forced to learn how to fly. I looked down as though from a great height, viewing the wreckage of Europe below me — the ruined grain fields, the cratered roads with their endless lines of refugees toiling onward, the smoking towers. Nothing was clear. At the war's end, there was no time to say what must be said, and no time to see what must be seen. We flew from it, and did not wish to see it, and closed our mouths to keep our griefs in.

  But now I look back as an old woman, and with one old hand over my brow to shield my eyes from the glare, I receive my past. I can see myself, and I can speak. Yes, it was me, a girl, with nothing but my free will clutched in my hand like an amber bead. God gave me this free will for my treasure. I can say this now. I understand this now. The war was a series of choices made by many people. Some of those choices were as wicked and shameful to humanity as anything in history. But some of us made other choices. I made mine.

  Sometimes, still—often, still—I cannot see myself in the mirror; instead, as if through a haze, I see a baby thrown into the air. But I will myself to change this vision. Something is thrown up into the air, yes, but it is a bird, it is a little bird released from a cage, and it flies away, rising higher and higher over the tree-tops, and over the roofs of the houses. A young girl leans out a window to scatter crumbs and watches this bird until it disappears from view. It is a little bird flying. A sparrow soaring.

  This is my will: to do right; to tell you; and to remember.

  Z Bogiem. Go with God.

  Postscript

  Late in 1949, Irene saw the Statue of Liberty from the deck of the troopship John Muir, which carried refugees from Europe. She was greeted by a member of the Jewish Resettlement Organization, who found her a place to live in Brooklyn. Before long, Irene was employed in a garment factory and learning English. Her new life had begun. Then, one day, to her astonishment, she bumped into William Opdyke in a coffee shop near the United Nations.