In My Hands: Memories of a Holocaust Rescuer

by Irene Gut Opdyke

  As the German divisions pressed toward Radom, the Polish army units, shockingly outgunned, began to retreat, and at St. Mary's the army officers asked for nurses and doctors to accompany them. Without hesitation, I raised my hand to volunteer: I wanted to take part in driving the Germans out of my country.

  “Hurry up, then,” one officer said as he checked his pistol. “We're leaving now.”

  I followed the group out to the alley, where the trucks were waiting. It was the first time I had set foot outside the hospital in four days, and I felt a strange disbelief that the sky was still blue and the sun was shining. Around me was complete destruction: cars burning, houses in ruins, glass and bricks strewn across the streets, a haze of smoke slinking along the sidewalks. Yet overhead were white, gauzy clouds. It was as though the sun and the clouds did not care that Poland was being murdered. I ducked into the back of a Red Cross truck filled with wounded soldiers, and gripped the tailgate as the truck lurched forward.

  It seemed all Radom was fleeing the Germans. The roads were choked with cars and trucks, horse-drawn wagons, bicycles, people on foot pushing wheelbarrows. Our driver honked the horn, trying to get through the crowds on the main road east. We had forty kilometers to travel before we reached the Wisła River.

  “We're going to blow the bridge once we get over,” I heard one soldier say to another. “We can't let the Germans cross the Wisła.”

  I stared out at the fleeing citizens, the evacuees, as we passed. I did not ask how they would get over the river. Their faces retreated from me, rushing backward as our truck hurried down the road, and in each face I saw Tatuś or Mamusia, Janina, Marysia, Bronia, or Władzia. I closed my eyes, desperate to stop them all from flying away from me. The tailpipe coughed exhaust fumes up into the open back of the truck, making my head swim and making me close my eyes even tighter. Then a wounded soldier cried out as we went over a bump, and I had to force myself to help him. The kilometers passed by in a blur of abandoned fields and empty houses. The road was littered with discarded suitcases, broken-down cars, piles of bedding.

  On the edge of a field I saw a peasant's cottage, its door open. Once, as a child, I had visited a farm outside Radom. It had a house like this one, with timber walls painted bone white, and a thatched roof. We had gone on a Sunday in the spring, when the farmer was taking down the bales of hay he had mounded around his house for winter insulation. As he pulled down the hay, scores of mice that had been nesting inside all winter scattered in every direction, squeaking frantically, while the farmer's sons chased them and killed them with sticks. I had stood shuddering with horror as the mice fled their home—that was like what I was watching now, but this was on such a large scale that I could not take it in. I could not believe what I was seeing.

  Ahead there was shouting, and the din of many vehicles blaring their horns at once. Many kilometers behind us, in the direction of Radom, we heard the thunder of tank fire. The sky behind us was thick with smoke. Our truck ground to a halt, but the engine shivered and shook like a terrified animal. We heard yelling, and then a cavalry officer galloped past us, away from the bridge, saber held aloft.

  “What does he think he'll do, attack a tank like that?” a soldier beside me wondered.

  The truck jerked forward again, and I saw the stone parapets of the bridge as we began to cross the river. The Wisła churned below us, gunmetal gray, and the bloated body of a horse turned and rolled in the current. It had no head. I closed my eyes as my stomach heaved, and when we bumped off the end of the bridge on the eastern shore I heard the footsteps of soldiers running back to lay explosives. Our truck whined and ground through gears up a rise, and then picked up speed. As we crested the hill, we heard the dull boom of the bridge being blown. I don't think any of us really believed that it would stop the Germans, but we pretended we did. We boasted that Hitler would drown in Mother Wisła, that Poland's great river would rise up in a flood to stop the enemy's advance. But even as we did, we heard the drone of Luftwaffe airplanes again, and we had to swallow our cheers.

  We drove for hours, until we reached another hospital. I don't even know where it was. I was so tired that I fell asleep in the truck as the wounded were being unloaded, but by then there were shouts of warning—the Germans had brought pontoons, and were already bridging the Wisła. The doctors were cursing, some even crying, as they ordered the wounded soldiers back onto the trucks.

  “Where are we going now?” I asked one of the soldiers.

  “Train station. We'll try to get northeast, to Kovno.”

  The sun was bleeding into the western hills, and it was already dark in the northeast, where Polish Lithuania stretched up toward Russia. I clutched at the side of the truck as we jounced down the road to the train station, and when we got nearer I saw that there were broken-down military transports straddling the tracks. Soldiers were hacking down saplings and chopping the branches from large trees to drape over the train cars for camouflage. An officer stood on the station platform yelling, “A doctor! Where's a damned doctor!”

  For a moment, the storm of frantic activity halted. We all turned our heads to listen, and we heard again the pulsing drone of approaching bombers.

  “These are Red Cross trucks!” I said to no one in particular. I grabbed a nurse's arm. “We're marked with red crosses— they won't bomb us, will they?”

  “I don't know, dear. Help me with this man.”

  I turned to help her support a soldier with a broken leg through the station, but my heart was racing as the sound of the planes grew louder. There were soldiers trying to push the broken trucks off the train tracks, and a young doctor was yelling for someone to bring water for washing, he had to perform surgery, and the train engineer was shouting to a brake-man on the carriage behind him as bursts of steam billowed out around the wheels, and then the bombs began falling on us, whistling as they came.

  Instantly, the shingled roof of the station burst into flame, and the spruce trees on the other side of the tracks flared up like candles. The planes were dropping incendiary bombs, which burned right through the metal roof over the platform. I could not catch my breath even to scream. The other nurse and I dragged and pushed the soldier between us up onto the train steps and into the carriage. The moment we were inside, the nurse left me with the wounded soldier and ran back for another.

  He had his arm thrown across my shoulder, and his weight dragged me down. “Here, rest here,” I whispered, trying to prop him up against the wall of the train compartment. His face was colorless, and shiny with sweat.

  “Are you a nurse?” he gasped, trying to wet his lips. His gaze flicked to my Red Cross armband and then to my face. “You look twelve years old.”

  “I'm a student nurse, I'm seventeen,” I quavered. Then another bomb fell outside the carriage and the window shattered from the pelting shrapnel, and we both ducked flying glass.

  I stood upright, clasping my hands together to keep them from shaking. On all sides, wounded soldiers lay or sat on the seats, moaning in pain. “I'll get a doctor,” I said, as calmly as I could. “I'll find a doctor. There must be a doctor on this train.”

  There was a blast from the train's whistle and the chuff-chuff of the engine reached our ears through the crashing of bombs and the screams of men outside. I grabbed the door frame to keep myself steady as the train shuddered and began to move forward, taking us east—toward the Russians.

  Mother Russia

  Kovno was quiet. We were far from the fighting, deep in the Lithuanian section of Poland, near the border with the Soviet Union. We were about two hundred altogether, soldiers, officers, and medical staff. We huddled in our coats outside one of the military warehouses. I had no gloves, and had to blow on my hands in the early-morning chill. We had left summer behind us. One of my nails had been torn almost to the quick, and it stung sharply as I blew on my fingers.

  I had no idea what was going on or what would happen. I was the youngest member of the group, and nobody bothered to explain
anything to me. There was a general, whose name I never learned. I knew we were waiting for him to make an announcement. The soldiers were waiting to hear how the Polish army would make its stand. We only had to regroup and resupply, the officers were assuring their men, and then we would be ready to confront the Germans. We would show the Wehrmacht what the Polish army was made of.

  One man jerked his chin toward the door, and we all turned to see the general coming out with an aide by his side. They stood on the steps. In the crowd, the soldiers stood at attention. The walking wounded tried to square their shoulders or hold themselves straight, but too many of them were weak and fell back on their crutches. I and the other nurses stood in a group, hugging ourselves for warmth, waiting for the general to speak. I could see he had not shaved in a few days, and the stubble of whiskers on his chin and cheeks was white, making him look like a tired old man.

  At last he cleared his throat. “God will surely bless you all for the courage and strength you have shown. You have fought bravely for our beloved country. Your grandchildren will bless you for it.” Here he paused, and cleared his throat again. “But the Polish army is through. I have just learned that the Germans and the Soviets have divided Poland between them. Even now, we are standing in Soviet territory. We are not a country any longer. There is no more Poland.”

  Moans of dismay and cries of denial rose from the crowd. I looked at the nurse standing next to me. Tears were running down her face. I could not understand what the general meant. How could there not be a Poland anymore? My feet were on the ground, Polish ground. How could the land not be?

  “The Polish government has reached England, and from there they will do everything possible to regain our country. In the meantime, you are free to go—to fight in the forests, to return to your homes—” His voice broke. Men throughout the crowd were crying now, cursing and sobbing at the same time. A colonel ripped the insignia from his uniform and crushed it in his hand, shaking with tears.

  The general indicated the warehouse door. “Take what you need. Take it all.” He pulled himself upright, and saluted the company. His chin was trembling. Then he strode down the steps, the aide hurrying behind him.

  At once, there was pandemonium. Everyone began talking, cursing the Germans and the Russians, trying to decide what to do. Some of the soldiers flung open the warehouse door, and within minutes, there was a steady stream of people going in and out. Blankets, guns, clothes, bottles of vodka, bags of flour, canned meat, cartons of cigarettes—anything useful was loaded onto the trucks we had commandeered. Someone dropped a bottle, and it smashed on the steps; a truck engine backfired as it roared to life. People were heading for the forest with everything they could carry.

  And I was going, too. Somehow, I was going with the ragtag army-without-a-country into the Lithuanian forest. It seemed unreal to me, as though I were only acting a part in a play. This could not be me, climbing into a truck and sitting on a crate of ammunition. The real Irena belonged at home, not here, unwashed, hungry, shivering. I watched a louse crawl out of my coat sleeve. This was not really me with lice. It could not be.

  The first night in the forest, we rigged blankets into tents. Some of us slept in the trucks, and some on the ground. Some didn't sleep at all, but stayed awake in the dark, smoking, plotting revenge. A few men got very drunk, and I heard them cursing and sobbing, or stumbling through their prayers. In the morning, we discovered that eight soldiers and officers had killed themselves during the night: guns in the mouth, knives across the throat.

  That was how our first day as exiles in our own land began. Someone offered a plan; some of the men formed a committee of leadership, but I didn't know them and they never asked my opinion. We would head south, toward Lvov, over five hundred kilometers away.

  Rumors constantly passed back and forth across our camp as we prepared to move: There was a general in Lvov—no, but there were five army units there and they were preparing to move against the Germans—no, but in Lvov there was an undersecretary of the Polish government and he was rallying the troops around him on orders from the exiled government in London—no, but in Lvov there would be an airlift of weapons and ammunition from the French—no, I never knew exactly why we were going to Lvov. Perhaps several of the men in charge had families there, and wanted to go home. I was put in a truck with the rest of the baggage, and we began our move.

  We didn't know what to expect from the Lithuanians, who were closer in culture to the Russians than to the Poles. Now that we were an illegal army in Russian-held territory, we did not know if we were safe or no, if we would be welcomed by the locals. We made our way from one village to the next through the massive forest, trading our supplies for theirs: vodka for potatoes, tobacco for sausages, sugar for eggs. Some of the villagers met us with suspicion. Some shut their doors in our faces. Some made hard bargains. Others were good to us, and told us when there were Soviet troops nearby. We crossed into the Polish Ukraine, and I gathered nuts and mushrooms, as though in a caricature of my school outings. I found grapevines draped shroudlike over a tree, but the grapes were shriveled and rotten from the frost. One afternoon as I walked the edge of a wood, there was an explosion of wingbeats at my feet, and a fat bird toiled upward, disappearing for a moment against the sun. Then there was a gunshot, and it fell to earth. One of the soldiers ran past me, grabbed up the bird, and wrung its neck for good measure. As he turned he saw my look, saw how I stared at him, saw me clutching the lapels of my coat together at my throat and breathing hard with surprise and remorse at having flushed the bird.

  The fall turned into winter, and we drove past frozen marshes, along rivers crusted with ice, always taking refuge in the forests. We were like animals, scavenging to survive. We lived however we could, growing sick, shivering, huddling ourselves against the snow. I was anemic, I knew; often I was so weak I felt faint if I stood up too quickly from scooping a handful of nuts from the ground. Sometimes we camped in one area for days, casting about like so many blind people, trying to learn what news there was. Other times we moved every day, testing first one Ukrainian village and then another for haven, without finding any.

  Every hour, every minute we spent on the roads in our trucks, we were in danger. Members of our group developed strange rituals and superstitions, or carried good-luck charms. Our existence was so precarious that we had reverted to the ways of a more primitive time. Our fires were small, for fear of giving away our position to Russian patrols, and for the same reason we could not rally ourselves with singing. I stayed with the women, sunk in despair of ever seeing my family again. Christmas came and went without comment, and we entered 1940 without hope. The great reason for going to Lvov never materialized. I had no idea what we were doing or where we were going, and I don't believe anyone else did, either. We seemed to be caught in a useless orbit around Lvov, never making any definitive move.

  In early January, I was chosen to go on a bartering mission with four soldiers and two other nurses. It was night, and the wheels of our truck churned through a dense layer of new snow. We parked in the woods at the edge of a village near Lvov and proceeded on foot. There were always Russian patrols around, so these missions were dangerous. My companions left me standing watch on a street corner while they entered a dark house.

  I pressed my back against the building. The wind shoved against me, seeping through my thin coat. The cold came up through the soles of my boots, gripping my feet hard. I was so full of fear that it was hard to think. The Russians were Communists—they did not believe in God. I had no idea what they were like, or what it meant that they were now our masters, or what they would do if they found us. Overhead were stars, thousands of stars like a field of snowdrops in spring. I had the sensation that I sometimes had in the spring when I looked out over a meadow full of flowers—that if I could only run fast enough I would rise up and fly. I wanted to run. I wanted my mother.

  Through the clear, cold air came the sound of a truck, and I saw the beams of headlights b
ouncing down the street: a Russian patrol. My eyes turned toward the stars again for a moment, and then I was running from cover, trying to run fast enough to rise up into the night sky. I heard the voices of the Russian soldiers as they chased after me, their boots crunching in the snow. Ahead of me was the dark edge of the forest. My breath burned my throat, and I felt the sting of snow as it sifted into the tops of my boots. The Russian soldiers were behind me, yelling and laughing. I was a bird, and I was trying to fly off, and they were going to shoot me. I was almost fast enough. I was almost fast enough.

  The Hospital

  This is hard to say. I was seventeen. I was shy with men; I had never had a boyfriend, never been kissed, I was a good Catholic girl. The Russian soldiers did not shoot me; they caught me and beat me unconscious. Then they raped me and left me for dead in the snow, under the frozen stars, with the dark forest keeping watch over my death.

  But I did not die. Another patrol found me crumpled on the ground like a tinker's rag and threw me into the back of a truck. I flickered in and out of consciousness as the truck pounded over the hard roads. Then I was dragged out, and there were lights around me, and I was on a stretcher. A woman spoke to me gently in Russian, stroking my battered face, testing my limbs for fractures. “Mamusia,” I whimpered, a child, and faded away again.

  When I awoke I was in a bed, covered with blankets. I stared at the ceiling through swollen eyelids. I heard the win-dowpanes rattling. There was a storm outside, and the moaning of the wind echoed in my head. Slowly, I turned my head, and saw a young man and an older woman in a Russian uniform.

  “I will interpret for the doctor,” the man said to me in Polish. “Can you speak?”

  I murmured something, and then cleared my throat. “Yes.”

  “You are in a hospital, but you are a prisoner. This is Dr. Olga Pavlovskaya. What is your name?”