How 12 Jews survived the Holocaust hidden by a maid in a Nazi officer’s basement

Irene Gut Opdyke once told an American television interviewer that “courage is a whisper from above.”

Opdyke heard that quiet voice when she decided to hide 12 Jews — one of them a pregnant woman — in the basement of a German army major’s home in Tarnopol, Poland, for nearly two years during World War II.

“I was the right person at the right time to do it,” she told the interviewer.

At the outbreak of the war, Opdyke was 19-year-old Irena Gut, a Polish nursing student whose education abruptly ended when she was sent into forced labor by the Germans.

Her amazing true story of selflessness and ingenuity is portrayed in the film “Irena’s Vow.” The Canadian-Polish production will be a Fathom Event in theaters throughout the United States on April 15 and 16. The film will also have a weeklong run in New York and Los Angeles starting April 15.

“I knew Irene for 10 years at the end of her life and would listen to her tell her story to various groups. She was like a grandmother to me. I was determined to get this film made. The story is so improbable, yet it is true. She hid Jews for many months right under a Nazi officer’s nose in his own house,” said screenwriter Dan Gordon, who originally created “Irena’s Vow” as a 2009 Broadway play.

Sophie Nélisse as Irena Gut in ‘Irena’s Vow.’ (Quiver Distribution)

The film begins with Gut, excellently played by Canadian actor Sophie Nélisse, volunteering as a nurse in eastern Poland after the German invasion on September 1, 1939. When the area is invaded by the Soviets a few weeks later, Gut returns to her hometown further west in Poland to find that it has been conquered by the Germans, with her parents and four younger sisters gone.

One day, while at church, the local residents are rounded up for forced labor. Gut is assigned to a munitions factory. Exhausted and anemic, Gut collapses at the feet of a high-ranking Nazi officer. When she pleads with him, saying that she is a good worker, he transfers her to a German military barracks in Tarnopol (today Ternopil in Ukraine), where she prepares meals in the kitchen and serves them in the dining room.

Gut is also put in charge of and befriends 11 Jews working in the laundry and tailoring shop downstairs. Her ability to eavesdrop on Nazi officers discussing the war’s progress and their orders for eradicating the Jews proves critically important for these Jews as time goes on.

Sophie Nélisse as Irena Gut in ‘Irena’s Vow.’ (Quiver Distribution)

Gut vowed to save a life if she ever could after witnessing a German soldier brutally murder a baby in front of its mother before killing the mother.

In tune with her “pure faith,” as Gordon described it, Gut prayed for a solution when she learned that the local ghetto was to be imminently liquidated.

“Her faith in God was not dogmatic, but it guided her. She believed that God doesn’t ask you to do what’s impossible. God asks you to do what’s possible,” Gordon said.

The solution comes the next day when Major Eduard Rügemer (Scottish actor Dougray Scott) tells her that he is moving into a villa outside town and making her his housekeeper.

In the ensuing days, as Gut prepares the villa for occupancy, she realizes she could hide her Jewish friends in the cellar. After she smuggles them in, they discover that the villa, built by a Jewish family, has a secret hiding place accessible from the basement.

“My mother recognized that it was a Jewish home because she saw it had a mezuzah on its doorpost. Growing up, she had Jewish friends from school and the neighborhood. Also, her family lived on the town’s main street and they would take in travelers, including Jews,” said Gut’s daughter Jeannie Opdyke Smith.

Irene Gut Opdyke as a young woman. (Courtesy of Jeannie Opdyke Smith)

Against all odds, the quick-thinking young woman keeps the Jews (including a twelfth taken in later) safe despite many close calls. Guided by her Catholic values and optimism, she is also influential in the decision of the pregnant couple, Ida and Lazar Haller, to not abort their baby despite the danger its birth would pose to all.

Not all goes to plan, and Rügemer, having discovered some of the hidden Jews, extorts Gut, making her his sex slave. The self-sacrificing Gut does what is necessary to safeguard her Jewish friends’ lives for many more months, until they can safely escape to the forest and join the partisans as the Russians advance on Tarnopol. Ida Lazar gives birth in the forest in May 1944 to a baby boy she and her husband name Roman.

Gut’s sacrifice is repaid by some of these Jews when at the end of the film she is caught by the Soviets, accused of being a German collaborator, and sent to a concentration camp. Without her friends’ ingenuity, she would have either languished behind the Iron Curtain or been killed.

‘Irena’s Vow’ screenwriter Dan Gordon. (Courtesy)

Smith is working to turn her mother’s story into a limited streaming series, which would allow for a more expanded, detailed account. This would likely include Gut’s having been brutally beaten, gang-raped, and left for dead by Soviet troops while on her way home after the Soviet invasion at the war’s outset.

When asked why this was not included in the film, Gordon said it was in the screenplay but that “it was decided by director [Louise Archambault] not to include it for reasons that are sufficient unto her.”

“Even more, I would like to include so much that came later in my mother’s life. Much of it, like her marrying my father, and reuniting with her sisters and Roman Haller, was bashert,” said Smith, using the Yiddish word for destiny.

Before the credits for “Irena’s Vow” roll, a few follow-ups are provided. The fact that Gut Opdyke, who died in 2003, was named one of the Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem, among other honors, comes as no surprise.

Irena Gut Opdyke reunited with Roman Haller, who was born because she hid his parents during the Holocaust, in Israel. Undated photograph. (Courtesy of Jeannie Opdyke Smith)

However, the revelation that Rügemer was taken in by the Haller family in Munich after the war and that little Roman called him Zaide (Yiddish for Grandpa), is a bombshell.

“Since my mom didn’t tell the Hallers and the other Jews anything about why Rügemer never exposed them, they had no way of knowing. They would have thought that he was complicit, a partner in keeping them alive,” Smith said.

Even more shocking — at least at first glance — is Rügemer having also been included among the Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem.

Jeannie Opdyke Smith works to perpetuate the story of her mother Irena Gut Opdyke’s Holocaust heroism. (Teresa Vick)

“I had real issues with this, but when I talked to the curator at Yad Vashem, he said that the honor was not for the Jews in the basement,” Smith said.

“Toward the end of the war when Hitler was doing his best to exterminate the remaining Jews, Rügemer did what was necessary to keep a group of Jews in his factory from being transported. That was what he was being honored for,” she said.

Smith thinks it was likely his interaction with the Jews hiding in his villa that made him begin to see things differently.

“When Rügemer wasn’t entertaining, he would allow some of them to come upstairs and they would play piano and sing and play games together,” Smith said.

“I think it softened his heart and he realized that these were just human beings and that there they were not the enemy at all,” she said.