Irena’s Story

After World War II at a displaced persons’ camp, Irena Gut, a young Polish Catholic, met her future husband, a U.N. staffer named William Opdyke. They settled in southern California where she became an interior decorator, wife and mother. She never talked about the war and her story was unknown until the day she received an unsolicited phone call. The caller was surveying how many people doubted the Holocaust ever happened. Irena’s story came rushing out.

During the German occupation of western Poland and the Russian occupation to the east (the two armies invaded in 1939), Irena (born May 15, 1918) joined the Polish resistance. Captured by the Russians, Irena, a nurse, was beaten, raped and forced to work in their medical camp. She escaped, only to be captured by the Germans and put to work in a munitions plant. An elderly SS officer Eduard Rugemer arranged her transfer to an army mess hall where she slipped food under the fence into the Jewish ghetto. When he was transferred to assignments in the Ukraine, he requested Irena as his housekeeper. While supervising captured Jews working in the laundry, she learned they were being sent to a death camp. She hid 12 of them in Rugemer’s villa, providing them food and clothes from his supply. When he discovered them, he didn’t report them in fear of being implicated himself. His silence was conditional – Irena had to become his mistress.

Irena died in 2003, spending her last 25 years telling her story in schools. In 1982 she was named by the Israeli Holocaust Commission as one of the Righteous Among the Nations, a title given to gentiles who risked their lives to save Jews, and presented the Israel Medal of Honor, the country’s highest tribute. The Vatican also gave her a special commendation and her story is part of a permanent exhibit at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.