In My Hands: Memories of a Holocaust Rescuer

by Irene Opdyke; Jennifer Armstrong

  In early May, I was startled to notice lilacs blooming on the roadside as we came home from delivering a baby, and I realized that my eighteenth birthday was only days away. Then a letter arrived from Dr. David, telling of the furor in the Ternopol hospital over my escape. Dr. Ksydzof had reported that I was a key member of a dangerous group of subversive Polish partisans, but that shortly after my escape I had been captured and was now rotting away in a Russian jail. Miriam and I chuckled over that, and we were both relieved to know that no suspicion had fallen on Dr. David. We were able to celebrate my birthday and my successful escape. We clinked our glasses together, then danced a few steps of a polka while Miriam hummed the tune. On the roof, two nest-building storks croaked like gossips.

  Svetlana was a tiny village, and I soon knew most of the residents by sight. I was Rachel Meyer, Dr. Miriam's little cousin, and they treated me with the same awe and respect they gave her. In the tiny, dirt-floored cottages where we treated colicky babies or bedridden grandmothers, the villagers bowed their heads before us and urged us to sit in their only chairs. They hardly ever spoke to us, except to explain their medical problems. They were poor farmers, mostly, people who had never been outside Svetlana, people who knew nothing of the world beyond their village limits. Communism had changed nothing about peasant life; their lives had been hard before, and they were hard now. A war being fought to the west meant nothing to them.

  But I was always conscious of it. When the sun went down every evening, my heart went with it into the west, yearning for my family in Poland. In spite of Miriam's endless kindness and friendship, I missed my home bitterly and never stopped thinking of it. I could not know what was happening in Poland, because I didn't trust the Communist newspapers to report the truth. Some of what they printed was probably correct, but how could I know what was true and what was propaganda?

  And so the months went by, and I found myself following country ways: up early in the morning before dawn, hard work all day, hearty simple meals and early to bed. In the summer, there was a typhoid epidemic, and we were busy for six weeks trying to keep death away from our poor people. Fall arrived, when the fields turned to amber and the wheat threshing filled the air with a golden haze. Then winter came down hard, and soon the sound of sleigh bells rang out over the frozen roads. The peasants celebrated Christmas out of sight of the Communist officials. It was now 1941, and I was still in Svetlana. Snow covered the village to the rooftops. Miriam and I stayed inside, warming our feet at the giant wood stove, as usual.

  In January, another letter came from Dr. David. “We have learned that the Russians and Germans have agreed to allow Poles who have been separated from their families by the invasion to cross battle lines in the spring. If you know of anyone in that position, you should tell him or her to be ready to come to Ternopol for processing when the time comes.”

  “He means me, Miriam,” I whispered. I clutched my hands around a cup to keep them from shaking. “He means me. I can go home.”

  “Yes, but it will be very dangerous for you in Ternopol, Irushka,” she said, folding the letter carefully. “You may still be wanted by the Red Army. You could be arrested.”

  I looked at her, and I guessed that she was frightened for herself and for Dr. David. I went to her and knelt by her side. “Miriam, you must know I would never, ever betray you. But you must let me go. I have to find my family. Please!”

  She put one hand on my hair. “I know, dear. But we must be cautious. We must be very cautious.”

  It was nearly impossible for me to contain my excitement, but I also knew I could not simply rush back to Ternopol. We began to study the newspapers every day, waiting for confirmation of Dr. David's report. In February, the Communists began to explain, in their usual self-congratulatory way, that the compassionate Soviet Union was allowing Polish families to be reunited. Miriam and I devised a story for the local magistrate to explain my decision to leave. We would say that my mother was dying, that I had to return to Ludmilla to keep house for my father.

  Day after day, we waited for final confirmation of the exchange. At last, it was time for me to go. Miriam went with me to the train station early on a cool morning in late March. Our breath fogged in the air. It was almost a year to the day since I had first arrived in Svetlana.

  “Be careful what you say,” Miriam warned me as we watched the train chug into the station. “I wish I could persuade you to stay here, where you are safe, but I know that is impossible. Keep your wits about you at the border. Anything can happen.”

  “Oh, I know, I know,” I said quickly, craning my head to watch the train. I turned to her, and suddenly I was crying. “Miriam, I will miss you so much.”

  “Good-bye, my dear cousin,” she replied.

  To cover her tears, she reached for a compartment door and hustled me up into the train. “Good-bye!”

  I pressed my face close to the window, not wanting to lose sight of her. As the train moved out, she receded farther and farther into the distance, until she was only a small dark figure by the tracks. Then the rising sun flooded the plain with light, and Miriam disappeared in the glare. I sat back on the wooden bench, and said good-bye to Rachel Meyer as well.

  Irena Gutowna was going home again. Home to war.

  Through the Gate

  I had to return to Ternopol. There, in the marketplace, would be a registration area for Polish nationals like me who needed to cross into the German sector. The announcement in the newspaper made it sound so simple: I had to be “processed,” and then I would be on my way to rejoin my family. The wheels of the train beat a rhythm as the muddy Ukrainian wheat lands blurred past the windows: almost home, almost home, almost home. Crows flapped languidly past my view. The catkins on a stand of birches quivered in a gust of wind. A farmer in a wagon with truck tires for wheels waited at a crossing, and behind him, the twin-rutted road stretched across undulating plains until the two worn grooves joined in a point.

  In wartime, things are slow. The train stopped so many times, there were so many delays and detours to let troop transports by, that it was twenty-four hours before we arrived in Ternopol. I jumped from my seat as the train began slowing and the moment it halted I swung myself down onto the platform. A gust of steam hissed out from under the train, shrouding me for a moment in a cloud. Then the vapor smoked away and I saw the crowds milling around me: families with suitcases, old women with lined faces and sadly tattered city hats, soldiers, police dogs. No young men, of course. I began walking as fast as I could through the crowd.

  “The marketplace?” I asked a young woman on the street.

  “There, that way,” she said, pointing, and I hurried that way.

  I was so close to being reunited with my family! All I had to do was fill out some paperwork, get a transit pass, and be on my way—assuming that nobody recognized me and knew I had escaped a year earlier. My heart filled with excitement as I raced down the stone sidewalk. The street was busy with traffic, the air thick with diesel smoke, and the gutters filled with horse manure. Cigarette smoke hung like a fog at the open door of a café, where old men in dark clothes stood at a bar sipping glasses of tea and reading newspapers printed on thin, flimsy paper. A radio played a scratchy record of patriotic Russian music.

  Ahead, I saw a line of people waiting for something, shuffling their feet and speaking tiredly with one another. I began edging past them, giving them scarcely a glance. There was a smell of unwashed bodies, and several babies were crying a monotonous, steady complaint. The line stretched for blocks, and as I made my way along it my steps began to slow. My heart grew heavy again.

  “Is this line—is this for the registration to go west?” I asked a man, praying that it was something else, a line for bread, a line for documents, a line for anything but what I wanted.

  Even as I spoke, the man nodded and hitched his broken suitcase higher in his arms. “I have been waiting on this line since yesterday,” he mumbled. “Those stinking guards— they're taking a
long time on purpose, just to spite us.”

  He continued grumbling to himself, cursing the Soviets and the Germans and everyone else. I turned to make my way to the end of the line, but realized that if I was in for such a long wait, I had better find a toilet first. I looked ahead to where the line snaked around a corner, into the marketplace. Perhaps there would be facilities there.

  I hugged my coat around my shoulders and continued walking forward, scanning the faces of the refugees as I went. It was foolish of me to think I might recognize someone. But I was so anxious to see my family and loved ones again that I was ready to search for them anywhere, like the drunken man who searches for his money under the streetlight simply because the light is better there. At last, here were my countrymen, and in my ears were Polish voices. Each “Tatuś” or “Mamusia” I overheard from a child twisted the blade of my homesickness.

  I rounded the corner and came into the market square, where the broken pavement glimmered with puddles. Here there was another, shorter line. At the head of this line, above a table, was a sign in both German and Polish: “Registration for German Citizens and Polish Citizens of German Descent.”

  Fear and excitement bolted through me, leaving my fingertips prickling. I was blond and blue-eyed, I spoke German, and I had a German name. I could pass myself off as of German descent. My cheeks flamed with heat as I took my place at the end of the line. I told myself that the ends justified the means. I knew I was not German, but they would not know I was not German. I had already spent a year lying and deceiving everyone in Svetlana—one more lie meant nothing, and I wanted to go home. I wanted to go home!

  In front of me, several people were chatting together, talking conspicuously about their relatives in the Fatherland, dropping names and making admiring comments about Hitler. I thought it was shameful that they would deny their Polishness, but I wondered if they were only acting, playing a part, as I was about to do, if they were doing anything they could just to get home. We must pretend to be German, so we could finally be Polish again.

  In less than two hours, I was at the registration table, smoothing back my hair and willing my brain to recall all the German I had learned in high school. A Soviet officer and a German officer sat at the table. I ignored the Russian and addressed the German.

  “Guten Tag, Herr Lieutenant,” I said, mustering all the poise I could manage.

  He glanced at me, taking in my German appearance, and smiled in a fatherly way. “Guten Tag, Fräulein. You are alone?”

  “Yes,” I continued in German. “I was separated from my family—they are in Oberschlesien. I am so anxious to return to them.”

  “Oberschlesien?” The officer scanned a list on the table. “Oberschlesien has been repatriated into the Fatherland. Here we can register you for admittance to the Polish General Gouvernement—what's left of Poland. Once there you can see about continuing across the border into Germany.”

  Crawling goose bumps prickled along my scalp. Kozłowa Góra had been swallowed into Germany. My voice came out high and false. “Oh, I see. Will it take very long to register?”

  “We will make it as quick as we can. Your name?” he asked.

  “Irene Gut.”

  Another officer wrote it down; they also took my age, my parents’ address, and the reason I had become trapped on the Soviet side. Then the first officer inclined his head.

  “Safe journey, Fräulein Gut.”

  And with that I was through. I could hardly believe it had been so simple. I walked on, my skin still prickling, expecting at any moment to be called back. But no voice was raised to halt me.

  Again I joined the end of a line, this one for transportation processing. The line from the registration of Polish citizens who did not claim any Germanness converged with the line I was in at the building ahead; I decided that I would really rather be with them. After all, I did not know if I would be sent to Germany if I stayed with the German group. I thought it safer to rejoin the line of people expecting to go into German-occupied Poland—the General Gouverne-ment. What I really wanted to do now was return to Radom and see what my aunt Helen Pawlowska could tell me about the status of things in Kozłowa Góra, in Oberschlesien; if my family was there, I would try to reach them. If not, I would not go to hated Germany. Once I knew where my family was, I could proceed.

  That is, assuming I could even find my aunt, and assuming that she knew what had become of my parents and sisters.

  Simply strolling across the pavement to the other line and saying, “Excuse me, may I cut in?” did not seem possible: There were armed guards everywhere keeping an eye on the refugees. We inched closer to the building. A cold, damp breeze blew across the square, blowing grit and scraps of paper into the puddles. Everyone was tired, cold, hungry, and full of restless anxiety. I stood biting my lips and staring at the opposite line.

  Suddenly, a woman in the Polish group crumpled in a faint, and the people around her dissolved into a formless crowd. Several women hurried to help her, and I found myself rushing with them. I knelt on the ground beside the fallen woman. My view of the courtyard and the German line was now barred by a forest of legs. I inched backward, deeper into the Polish crowd, and then stood up, wiping my hands on my skirt and leaving my German identity behind. A small girl looked up at me curiously, a strangely adult look in her eyes. I put a finger to my lips and then turned away from her, feeling the pounding beat of my heart grow quieter.

  Now there was more waiting, another table, more officers. I bought a transport pass for Radom with the money Miriam had given me. The pass had the time of my train: eight o'clock that evening. I stood looking down at the slip of paper that was my passport back to German-occupied Poland. It fluttered in a breath of wind that blew dust along the pavements, and I clasped it to my heart, suddenly terrified of losing it.

  I had no pockets in my dress. I had a little handbag, but I was nervous of pickpockets or thieves. The safest place I could think of to keep my pass was inside my brassiere. Being so thin and small, I had never worn a brassiere before, but Miriam had given me one, telling me to stuff it with cotton to make me look less like the lost and pitiful waif I was. I hurried into the rest room and tucked the precious pass in next to my skin. For extra safety, I cinched my belt tightly around my waist. Now I was ready to go to the train station.

  But it was late afternoon, and I had hours to kill before my train left. I wandered the town, gazing idly into shops that had very little to sell, reading the public notices on a signboard. On a bridge over the slender Seret River, I paused to watch the ducks dabbling in the mud. A weak sun came out, striking on the ripples near the bank. I picked at the masonry of the bridge, crumbling the old mortar under my fingers and dropping the pebbles into the water. My stomach grumbled loudly. I headed back into town and found a park, where I sat on a bench in the weak spring sun and tried to teach myself patience. Around me were bare garden beds where bulbs should have been planted, and gravel paths that looked as though they had gone unraked for months. The park had a gloomy, neglected feeling that made me shiver. I was vaguely aware of a loud voice droning nearby in Russian, and I cupped my ear to hear the words.

  “How lucky we are that Mother Russia saved us from the capitalists! Now everyone is the same, from the president down to the lowliest worker!”

  It was the usual Communist propaganda, but I was curious to see who was delivering this monotonous lecture in the middle of an empty park. I was about to rise from my seat to follow the voice, when I saw two Russian soldiers walking toward me along the path. Their boots crunched loudly on the gravel.

  They stared at me as they passed, and I blushed and ducked my head, not wanting them to try to flirt with me. They walked on by. I let out a small sigh of relief, but even as I did I felt a strange prickle of worry. Something about them seemed slightly familiar. There was only one place I could have met them before: the Ternopol hospital. I jumped up from the bench and began walking as quickly as I could.

  I was se
riously alarmed. Had they recognized me? I cursed myself for being so careless. Why had I dawdled all over Ternopol, showing myself to the whole town? Had I lost my senses? I had more than my own safety at stake: I had promised Dr. David and Miriam I would not endanger them. The voice I had followed was very loud now, although I saw no one. At last, I realized the voice was coming from a loudspeaker attached to a statue of Lenin. “How lucky we are!” it began again in the same dreary tone. On the statue's shoulders hunched two pigeons who tipped their heads and fixed me with their black eyes.

  It was as though the statue were watching me, lecturing me, mocking me for thinking I could get home. I shuddered violently and looked back over my shoulder to see if the two soldiers were following me. I clutched at my chest, feeling the dry whisper of paper against my skin. I had only a few hours to wait for my train. I would hide at the train station, among the crowds. I would keep to myself and try to remember that I had other people's secrets to keep safe.

  I heard footsteps behind me, and across a stretch of muddy lawn I saw a Russian patrol walking toward the bench I had just vacated. My stomach rolled over. Slowly, not wanting to attract any attention, I began walking toward the park gate. Like an ostrich, I kept my head down, praying not to be seen.

  And then into my field of view, hard and black against the gray gravel, came army boots. I stopped, and looked up into the faces of another Russian patrol.

  The loudspeaker behind me continued to drone, “How lucky we are that Mother Russia has saved us!”

  “This way,” they said, taking my arms and leading me between them through the gate.

  My Heart, Like a Netted Bird

  At the commissariat I was put in a small, windowless room. The only furnishings were a table and a chair, and a single lightbulb in the ceiling—the usual stereotyped shabby furniture you see in any movie with an interrogation scene, I noticed. I was able to view my surroundings with this kind of detachment, in spite of being terrified: There was just some part of me that could not believe it was real, that I could not possibly be in this scene.