Irena Gut Opdyke hid Jewish families in a German officer’s villa during the Holocaust

In 1943, during the destruction of Jewish communities in German-occupied Poland, Irena Gut was working for a German military officer. The position gave her something the people marked for death scarcely possessed: permission to move, purchase food and cross the barriers separating Jewish prisoners from the outside world.

She began with necessities smuggled to Jewish labourers. Then the danger escalated. In Tarnopol, as the Germans dismantled the remaining Jewish camp, she helped people find refuge. Some hid in laundry facilities; others sheltered in a villa requisitioned by the German major Eduard Ruegemer. A young Polish woman was secretly sustaining Jews in premises belonging to the occupiers.

The story is sometimes reduced to a single heroic woman tricking a cartoonishly oblivious Nazi. The archival account is more complicated, and more revealing. Yad Vashem records that Ruegemer himself also assisted Jews, including by obtaining passes and helping some families reach relative safety. He was later recognised as Righteous Among the Nations. Gut nevertheless faced enormous danger from blackmailers, Gestapo officers and anyone willing to denounce her.

In March 1944 the Gestapo arrested her, but she escaped. Decades later, survivors invited her to Israel. Yad Vashem recognised her in 1982. Her example reveals a characteristic of rescue under dictatorship: it often began not with a grand plan, but with someone discovering that a position inside the system gave them just enough room to disobey it.

Her date of birth is sometimes printed as 1922 because of discrepancies in autobiographical accounts; Polish baptismal documentation places it in 1918. Her actions deserve to be remembered without turning the surviving record into legend.

Sources and photograph

Yad Vashem, Righteous Among the Nations: Irena Gut Opdyke. Historical photograph or documentary image: original image source.

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