What we are told is true facts have been verified. This is Irene Gut Opdyke’s story, as she told it to author Jennifer Armstrong. The years after the war are briefly summarized – where Irene came to live (the USA, first NY and then California), whom she married (William Opdyke – a UN official) and what she did (gave lectures to school children). The war years, the invasion of that part of Poland where she lived first by the Russians, then the Nazis and then the Russians again, is the primary focus of the book. She was their first child, born in 1922 in the village Kolzienice in eastern Poland, near the Ukraine border. The story begins with how her parents met. Don’t think that because it is matter-of-factly told you will be left unmoved. This happened and then this and then that. At the same time, she recognizes the consequences of her own actions as a partisan. Her suffering did not make her bitter and she refused to give up. We are all only human, but she responded with bravery and help and kindness to others. Horrible things happened to Irene and she suffered just as you and I would. You know why you can go on reading one holocaust story after another? It is because they show you not only the worst in man but also the best. You should read this memoir about what Irene Gut, a Catholic Polish girl of only seventeen, did to save others’ lives. I thought, ”Gosh, should I really read another holocaust memoir?” The answer is yes, and you should too, even if you have read a zillion already. This numbness led to the murder of six million people and it is beyond comprehension. Real devils are imperfect people who allow themselves to be numb to the pain they inflict. Real heros are imperfect people who are able to look beyond their own survival to help someone else. evil narratives concocted by storytellers to give us convenient heros and devils. Reading books on the Holocaust remind me that real people survived and real people died. Why did she risk her own life to help? When so many others refused, why she did she choose to see? This is the beginning of a path that leads to hiding Jews and an incredible story of luck and courage. It's just a drop in the ocean, but she feels she has to start somewhere. The next day the box is empty and she replaces it with a new box. The most touching chapter in the book is when she fills a box with food (including potato peelings from the trash) and shoves it under a fence that leads to the ghetto. She sees the murder of Jews in the ghetto and decides to help. She is placed as a servant in a Nazi officers' club. She manages to escape the slow death of a work camp because of her pretty face and her ability to speak German. Like Poland itself, she is brutalized by Russians and Germans.ĭespite her own hardships, she is not blind to what is happening to the Jews. In 1939 when Poland is invaded, she is 16 years old and training to be a nurse. This is the story of a Catholic girl in Poland. When I understood what the bird was, it was one of the most chilling things that I have ever read. It was not a bird, and it was not in a wheat field, but you can't understand what it was yet." "There was a bird flushed up from the wheat fields, disappearing in a blur of wings against the sun, and then a gunshot and it fell to the earth. It was as simple and as impossible as that. This young woman was determined to deliver her friends from evil. And, when she was made the housekeeper of a Nazi major, she successfully hid twelve Jews in the basement of his home until the Germans' defeat. She smuggled people from the work camp into the forest. She raided the German Warenhaus for food and blankets. She would use this Aryan mask as both a shield and a sword: She picked up snatches of conversation along with the Nazis' dirty dishes and passed the information to Jews in the ghetto. Irene was forced to work for the German Army, but her blond hair, her blue eyes, and her youth bought her the relatively safe job of waitress in an officers' dining room. As the war progressed, the soldiers of two countries stripped her of all she loved - her family, her home, her innocence - but the degradations only strengthened her will. Irene Gut was just a girl when the war began: seventeen, a Polish patriot, a student nurse, a good Catholic girl. Through this intimate and compelling memoir, we are witness to the growth of a hero. One's first steps are always small: I had begun by hiding food under a fence." "You must understand that I did not become a resistance fighter, a smuggler of Jews, a defier of the SS and the Nazis all at once.
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