In My Hands: Memories of a Holocaust Rescuer

by Irene Gut Opdyke

  The winters in Poland are very long and very bitter, but in our house, we were always warm and happy. After dinner, we gathered around the piano to sing folk songs while Tatuś played.

  Other nights, Mamusia would welcome her friends into the house for feather stripping. The women would sit around the table, peeling the soft fluff from duck and goose quills, and tell ghost stories while they stuffed pillows. Janina and I would sneak down the stairs to listen to their tales. The air would fill with floating down like softly falling snow and Janina and I would press our faces into our laps to muffle our sneezes.

  Then, as the winter deepened, it would be time to think of Christmas. We spread the table with hay, to signify the manger, and then laid a fresh white cloth over it. All day long on Christmas Eve, we were busy in the kitchen, making pierogis, breads, cookies, pickled fish, potatoes, and cabbage. We would laugh and sing “Bóg Się Rodzi” and other carols as the house filled with the scent of vanilla, cinnamon, and mushrooms.

  When night fell, we bundled ourselves into our coats and hats, and stepped outside to walk to the shrine of Jasna Góra. The snow squeaked under our boots as we tramped toward the Bright Mountain fortress. I imagined the Holy Mother appearing over the fortress as she had when the invading Swedes had conquered all of Poland, and the last of the defenders were making their stand at Jasna Góra. It was said that her divine image had shielded the fortress from harm, allowing Jasna Góra to withstand the siege and throw back the invaders.

  I tipped my head back and looked at the stars glittering in the frozen sky. No Holy Mary appeared to me, but the lights pouring from the windows of the fortress on the hill were a wonderful vision in themselves. With the other pilgrims, we wound our way, singing, up the hillside to the magnificent basilica. Inside the church, the high, vaulted ceiling echoed with song and prayer. The flickering light of a thousand candles gleamed on holy relics and statues. And behind the altar, revealed behind its wooden door, was the Black Madonna of Częstochowa.

  I was always awed when I saw the holy icon. It was a small painting, and it was dark with age. But the simple image of the Madonna and Child was said to have miraculous power, and on Christmas night, with the stuffy air full of incense and the voices of the priests murmuring in Latin, on that night it was possible to believe the painting was miraculous, that it was the protector of Poland. It was easy for me to believe that with such a powerful guardian, Poland would never fall.

  This was in the early 1930s, when it was still possible to believe such things.

  Before the Storm

  In 1934, German president Paul von Hindenburg died. By August, Adolf Hitler had become both chancellor and president of Germany, taking the title Der Führer. I was oblivious to politics, however; if, some evening over cigarettes and vodka, Tatuś and his partner discussed the rise of Hitler and his fanatical cronies in neighboring Germany, I did not pay attention.

  My teenage years had begun, and we now lived in the small town of Kozłowa Góra, in the Polish district known as Upper Silesia, or Oberschlesien. Here, we were only six kilometers from the German border, and many of our new neighbors were of German descent. We began to learn German in school, and grew accustomed to seeing it written in town and hearing it spoken on the street. People came and went easily across the border, especially in the countryside, and there were some little towns that had never quite made up their minds whether they were Polish or German. Indeed, the borders had shifted so often over the centuries that to many people, it did not make any difference whether they were governed from Berlin or Warsaw.

  Because of our name, Gut, many people assumed that we were of German descent, but my parents were fiercely patriotic. We were Polish. I was raised to be proud of that fact. Lessons in school had told me the cruel history of my country, which had been invaded repeatedly over the centuries—from the west by the Germans, from the north by Swedes and Lithuanians, from the east by Tatars and Russians, from the south by Hungarians. Always, Poland had struggled to preserve itself. Its borders had shifted over the centuries and sometimes dissolved altogether as it was sucked in by a larger or fiercer power. Beautiful, bountiful Poland, a country whose very name means “field,” had the richest agricultural land in Europe, and every other country wanted to reap that harvest. We Poles knew we were surrounded by grasping hands; the knowledge made us guard our land and our identity all the more loyally.

  But as I say, I was a teenager, and politics was abstract to me. Also, the subject was never discussed at dinner—in those days, it was not a suitable topic for girls. Besides, I was busy with other things. In high school, I became a member of the school dance group, and we performed traditional Polish dances at festivals all over the western and southern part of the country.

  Performing with the dance group gave me a taste of the spotlight, and I began to try out for school plays. Sometimes I actually daydreamed about being a movie actress, but I was secretly afraid that I was too plain. I was thin and pale; often, on the way to school, I tried to darken my eyebrows with burnt matches and put some color in my cheeks and lips with red paper that I dampened with spit. But as my sisters and I grew older, it became clear that although I was the eldest, Janina was the standout. She was taller than I was, elegant and graceful. She turned heads wherever she went, and I always seemed to be in her shadow, the ugly duckling.

  I did not worry, particularly. At that time, I was not interested in boys, except as friends. I wore my hair short, and climbed trees and rode horses and made up adventure stories that I wrote down in my diary. In my fantasies, I was always caught up in heroic struggles, and I saw myself saving lives, sacrificing myself for others. I had far loftier ambitions than mere romance.

  One Christmas, I became convinced these fantasies would come true. My grandmother Rębieś had taught us an old custom: We melted candle wax and poured it into a bowl of very cold water. The moment the wax hit the water it hardened into a twisted, fantastical shape, and we tried to read our fortunes by holding the blob of wax up against the light and seeing what sort of shadow it cast. When it came to my turn, I held my wax up to the light and we all studied the silhouette on the wall. It resembled a ship crossing the ocean, we decided. A ship with a crucifix on its prow. My sisters were awed into silence by this fortune, and I was thrilled: I was destined to have adventures. Righteous adventures.

  However, in Kozłowa Góra in the mid-thirties, there weren't very many righteous adventures available. Mamusia urged us to direct our energy into useful—although unexciting—projects. Along with my sisters, I helped her prepare baskets of food for the poor and the sick. We scavenged in the ash heap at Tatuś’ glass and ceramics factory, looking for rejects of colored glass. We gave these to women who crushed them into fake gems for decorating picture frames. In every charitable act we performed, Mamusia and Tatuś were our models; they were generous and kind to everyone, even to the Gypsies who camped in the woods outside town and made people suspicious with their strange costumes and language. Wounded animals, out-of-luck neighbors, sick strangers— Mamusia and Tatuś welcomed them all.

  With their encouragement, I decided to become a volunteer for the Red Cross, and I donned the uniform of a candy striper. At our candy-striper meetings, we practiced bandaging one another, learning first aid, and preparing ourselves for unspecified emergencies. We visited the hospital, bringing flowers and fruit to the patients and trying to be helpful. It was in the hospital that I began to admire the nuns who had devoted their lives to the sick. Over time, I concluded that I should be a nun. It was not the nuns’ life of piety that attracted me, but their sense of purpose and their devotion to service.

  Tatuś was surprised when I told him. He suggested that I first train as a nurse. If that did not satisfy me, then I could begin studying to become a nun. I would enroll in the nursing school of St. Mary's Hospital, in Radom. It was over two hundred kilometers away, but it was the best nursing school in Poland.

  So, in 1938, I began my studies in Radom. The city wa
s an industrial center, filled with munitions plants, enamel works, steel foundries, ceramics factories, and tanneries, which filled the smoky air with a rank, animal-chemical smell. I lived in a rooming house with other student nurses, and threw myself into my work. I missed my family, and I was nervous to be in a strange city, so I hid behind my books and studied hard to forget my loneliness. Most of the other girls took their duties lightly, and went out in the evenings to the movies or to dances. But I took my responsibilities very seriously and, being shy, I shunned their company. My mother's sister, Helen, lived in Radom, and I sometimes had dinner with her; but for the most part, when I was not at school or in the hospital I stayed in my room and studied anatomy or chemistry. I intended to be the best in my class and make my parents proud of me.

  The practical experience I gained in the hospital taught me many things that weren't in my books. One thing I learned on my rounds was that men love to make young nurses blush, and I came to dread entering the men's wards. Winks and grins and requests for baths sometimes brought such color into my face that the men would howl with laughter and tease me even more. I was only sixteen, after all, and I was as easy to startle and flush from cover as a pheasant.

  As evening fell, most of the girls in my rooming house would chatter and laugh as they went out, leaving the house quiet in their wake. I was happy to stay alone. From my window as I studied, I sometimes saw groups of university students walking arm in arm in the glare of the streetlights, singing patriotic songs, their coats flapping open in the breeze. I was beginning to be aware that Hitler had made threats against Poland. Under the Treaty of Versailles, which had settled the Great War of 1914-1918, Germany had lost much territory that it had won in earlier conquests. Now Hitler was determined to reclaim that land, to revive the power and might of Germany and make it great once more in 3 the eyes of the world.

  But much of the land Hitler wanted was Poland's, and always had been. Many German immigrants had settled there, especially in the west, where my family was, but that did not make it Germany! Hitler wanted Lebensraum, living space, for the Germans, and our Poland was the space he wanted.

  “Irena, we want you to come home,” Tatuś and Mamusia wrote to me in their letters. “Many people think war is imminent, and we hate to think of you so far from us. The family should be together.”

  But I did not listen. If it came to war, I would do my part for Poland. If it came to war, my country would need trained nurses. No, I wrote to my parents. I must stay here. I know what my duty is. If Hitler tries to come here, we will fight him and we will chase him all the way back to Berlin. Besides, we knew that old enemies Germany and the Soviet Union watched each other like two dogs guarding a bone; if one of them made the slightest move toward Poland, it would be considered an act of war against the other. The mutual suspicion and hatred between the Germans and the Soviets was our guarantee.

  When I returned home for the summer at the end of my first year, I found Kozłowa Góra had changed. Many of our neighbors had become German, renouncing their Polish heritage, speaking only German, openly admiring the policies of Hitler and his National Socialist party, the Nazis. And in some shops—not many, but some—there were signs saying, “Don't Buy from Jews!” or “A Poland Free from Jews Is a Free Poland.”

  This mystified me. In my home, there had never been any distinction made between people. Many of our friends were Jewish, but we did not say to ourselves, “Our Jewish friends, the Gonsiorowiczes.” It had never occurred to me to distinguish between people based on their religion. But this was precisely what Hitler was doing a mere six kilometers away.

  We did not imagine where it would lead. How could we? To us, Germany had always been a seat of civilization, the home of poets and musicians, philosophers and scientists. We believed it was a rational, cultured country.

  How could we know that the Germans did not feel the same about us? How could we know the depth of their scorn for us? Despite our centuries of glorious achievements, despite our Chopins and Copernicuses, our cathedrals and our heroes and our horses—despite all this, Germany viewed Poland as a land of Slavic brutes, fit only for labor.

  And so Hitler wanted to destroy us.

  The Lightning War

  That summer after my first year of school was the last happy time I was to spend with my family, but none of us knew it in August when I returned to Radom to resume my studies. On the twenty-fourth, Germany and the Soviet Union stunned the world by announcing the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, a non-aggression treaty: Neither would make war against the other. People gathered on the streets and in the cafés, speculating about what this news meant to Poland. We sat defenseless between these two countries: Would they simply carve us up and eat us? There was no topic of conversation besides politics.

  Suspense grew, and the heat was sweltering. I kept a basin of water on my desk at night so I could wipe down my face and arms and neck while I studied in my hot, stuffy room. The rattle of trucks and cars reached me through my open window, and the smell of exhaust fumes, and the sour breath of a cheap restaurant next door. As the month ran out, all of us began to look toward the sky, thirsty for rain. Dust rose from the roads as we walked from our dormitory to St. Mary's. In the pastures on the edge of town, horses pawed at the hard, baked ground. It was the kind of dry, oppressive heat that comes before a thunderstorm.

  On September 1, the storm broke, but not in the way we had expected. I was on my way to the hospital, walking across an empty lot, when a steady, pulsing drone reached my ears. I looked up, one hand on my Red Cross cap to keep it from slipping as I tipped my head back. Before I even saw the planes, I began to hear explosions, and then there they were— the sky was black with them: row after row of German bombers, flying in formation over Radom. Even as I covered my ears against the roar, I felt the earth shaking with detonations. Across the field from where I stood, the front of an apartment building suddenly sheared away, and a blue plush sofa toppled to the street. Dust and smoke billowed up from every corner of the city. I stood frozen, too stunned to move. The air was filled with the screams of falling bombs and the roar of their blasts. Sirens wailed from every direction.

  “Get down, you idiot!” someone screamed at me. “You're going to get yourself killed!”

  I felt someone catch my arm and drag me toward a ditch. In a daze, I looked to see who was with me; it was one of the interns from St. Mary's, Dr. Gribowski. We crouched in the ditch as the German planes charged by overhead. With each bomb blast, my whole body jumped. Clumps of dirt rained down on my head, and a sharp chip of masonry cut my cheek. From nearby I heard the terrified scream of a horse, and then the crashing of glass and an engine racing, and all the time the sound of the airplane engines kept pounding against our ears.

  “Come on!” Gribowski shouted. “They'll need us at the hospital.”

  Together, we began dodging across the lot. Craters filled with bricks and rubble blocked our way as we bolted into a street. The city was on fire. People were running wildly, screaming for their children, screaming from terrible wounds. A toddler whose face was streaked with dirt and tears sat naked on a set of front steps; behind him was only empty space where a house should have been. A truck barreled down the street, honking its horn continuously; it crashed into a lamppost, reversed, and jolted off again. I jerked at another huge explosion from the direction of the munitions factory. As I stumbled along the sidewalk I saw a woman whose hands were covered with blood, and I opened my mouth to say something but could not speak. A dog was barking, barking.

  “The hospital!” the intern yelled. The sirens shrieked like lunatics. I thought I would begin screaming myself at any moment.

  St. Mary's was in chaos when we arrived. Plaster dust rained down from the ceiling with each blast, and the lights swung wildly, throwing weird shadows across the wards. Doctors and nurses barked orders over the moans of patients. Nuns sped from one bed to another, their black habits billowing around them. And the wounded—the wounded were everywhere,
on beds, on chairs, on the floor, holding themselves up against the walls, crowding the stairwells. I hurried into a surgery ward and my foot slid out from under me; I looked down, and saw a smear of blood on the floor. It was unreal—one minute I had been home in the shelter of my loving family and the next I was standing in blood and ducking at the whistle of a bomb. This could not be me!

  “Irena Gutowna, we need you over here!” someone shouted.

  My whole world was now St. Mary's Hospital. I slept in my clothes, huddled under a sink or inside a broom closet, flinching at every loud noise. The rest of the time was one grotesque emergency after another. We were out of food, now we were out of sulfa drugs, we had no clean sheets, now the electricity was out—and the wounded kept arriving. In addition to civilians, we soon had Polish soldiers in the hospital, and from them we began to hear reports of the ground invasion.

  German tanks had rolled over the border by the thousands. The ground, baked hard by summer sun, made roads unnecessary: The Panzers simply rolled over the amber fields, threshing the harvest to dust. Behind the tanks came the trucks and the infantry, the Wehrmacht, attacking Polish soldiers and civilians alike, pounding cities and villages to ruins. It was total war, war unlike anything we'd ever heard of. The carnage was staggering. Germany had claimed western Poland, chewed it up, and swallowed it in one gulp.

  My hands shook as I tried to apply dressings to terrible wounds. My family was in the west. Kozłowa Góra, only six kilometers from the old border, was now trapped inside Hitler's Germany. With phone service out, I had no way to contact Tatuś and Mamusia. I had no way of knowing if they were safe, if my sisters were alive and unhurt. I worked in a daze of grief for Poland and for myself. I feared I would never see my beloved family again. I thought briefly of my aunt Helen, wondering if I could get word to her, or if she was even there. Her husband was in the army, and who could say where he was now?