Irena Gut

Irene Gut Opdyke
Front cover of In My Hands. Memories of a Holocaust Rescuer by Irene Gut Opdyke,
Born	5 May 1922 Kozienice, Poland
Occupation	Writer
Nationality	Polish American
Genre	World War II history

Irene Gut Opdyke born Irena Gut (5 May 1922 – 17 May 2003) was a Polish nurse who gained international recognition for aiding Polish Jews persecuted by Nazi Germany during World War II. She was honored as the Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem for risking her own life to save twelve Jews from certain death.

Irena Gut was born into a Catholic family with five daughters in Kozienice, Poland, during the interwar period. The family moved to Radom where she enrolled at the nursing school before the Nazi-Soviet invasion of 1939. At the age of 20, Irena witnessed a German soldier kill an infant in 1942. This event transformed her life. During the German occupation, Gut was hired by Major Eduard Rügemer to work in a kitchen of a hotel which frequently served Nazi officials. Inspired by her religious faith, Gut would secretly take food from the hotel and deliver it to the Radom Ghetto.

She smuggled Jews out of the ghetto into the surrounding forest and delivered food for them there as well. Meanwhile, Rügemer asked Gut to work as a housekeeper in his requisitioned villa. She hid 12 Jews in the cellar. They would come out and help her clean the house when he was not around. One day Rügemer found out about the refugees in the basement and coerced Gut into becoming his mistress to escape capital punishment. Rügemer fled with the Germans in 1944 ahead of the Russian advance. She and several Jews also fled west from Soviet occupied Poland to the Allied-occupied Germany. She was put in a Displaced Persons camp, where she met William Opdyke, a United Nations worker from New York City. She immigrated to the United States and married William Opdyke shortly thereafter. They raised a family together.

After years of silence regarding her wartime experience, in 1975 Opdyke was convinced to speak after hearing a neo-Nazi claim that the Holocaust never occurred. Feeling compelled now to share her story, Opdyke began a public speaking career which culminated in her memoir: In My Hands: Memoirs of a Holocaust Rescuer. In 1982, Irena Opdyke née Gut was recognized and honored by Yad Vashem as one of the Polish Righteous Among the Nations.