Yorba Linda Woman Tells of Hiding Jews From Nazis

‘We are getting old. For the dead and the living, we must bear witness.’

One day in 1943, Irene Opdyke heard a knock at the door of the Polish villa where she was a housekeeper. Careful as always, she looked through the peephole. On the other side was a black velvet band with a shining, silver skull--the symbol of the Nazi Gestapo.

She wasn’t ready.

If the Gestapo officer were to find the Jews sitting just then in the kitchen, it would mean death. Death for her and the 12 Jews Opdyke had been hiding in the cellar, and death for the German major for whom she worked. He was a loyal officer who was unaware of the Jewish safehouse below and for months had been entertaining high-ranking SS and Gestapo officers in the villa.

To buy hiding time, Opdyke ran to the bathroom, stuck her head under the faucet and returned slowly to the door. Rubbing her head with a towel, she apologized to the angry officers and explained that she hadn’t heard them because she had been washing her hair. After a heart-pounding search that stopped just short of the cellar door, they left.

The daily terror of the war years was so intense, Opdyke said, that she wanted only to forget it for decades afterwards. But she exhumed her stories a few years ago when groups such as the Institute for Historical Review, which recently obtained a Costa Mesa address, started denying that the Holocaust ever happened.

“We are getting old. For the dead and the living, we must bear witness,” said Opdyke, 67, who lives in Yorba Linda. If the Holocaust did not exist, she asks, “why did I put my life in danger?”

Sometimes the retelling makes her cry, tremble or nearly shout with anger. Sometimes it seems to her that the Polish Catholic girl who defied the Nazis to save at least 12 other lives was someone else.

Named ‘Righteous Gentile’

As a result of her speaking out and the efforts of a dedicated rabbi in Fullerton, a memorial museum to the Holocaust in Israel called Yad Vashem has included her as one of the “Righteous Among the Nations of the World.” Rabbi Haim Asa of Temple Beth Tikvah in Fullerton said he believes Opdyke is Orange County’s only “Righteous Gentile”--one of an estimated 5,000 non-Jewish people who risked their lives to save the Jews during the Holocaust. In 1982, an olive tree was planted in her honor along the Avenue of the Righteous overlooking Jerusalem.

In 1984, she participated in a nationwide conference held by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council to sort out how and why an estimated 5,000 Europeans “remained human in an inhuman society”--helping to save Jewish friends, neighbors or even strangers while the vast majority did not.

On May 9 her story aired over public television on “Courage to Care,” a documentary focusing on four such World War II “rescuers.” (The program was nominated for an Academy Award this year as Best Documentary Short.)

Opdyke was 19 when Hitler’s troops invaded Poland in 1939 and started her real-life drama that contains more danger, romance, coincidence, unlikely heroes and villains, sorrow and happy endings than would be allowed in fiction. “It would make a terrific movie,” said Opdyke, who has begun writing her memoirs.

Her name then was Irene Gut--the German word for good. She had just started studying nursing in Radom, miles away from her home town of Koziance near the German border, where she had lived with her four younger sisters, her architect father and her mother--a gentle woman who took in stray or wounded animals.

Suddenly, she found herself alone in the middle of war, unable to return home. With Germans invading from the west and Russians invading from the east, “it was a nightmare,” she said. She joined with other nurses and fled to the forests of the Ukraine. There she was raped and left unconscious and bleeding by three Russian soldiers.

After recovering in a Russian hospital, she went to work in an infectious diseases hospital in the Ukraine. After a year, she embarked on a fruitless search for her parents, living for a while in a church.

One Sunday after a service, German soldiers surrounded the church. They separated the young men and women from the others and transported them to Germany to work in factories and fields. “The Polish people in Hitler’s eyes,” Opdyke recalled, “were only a notch better than Jews.”

On the way to the munitions factory where she was assigned, Opdyke witnessed a death march. It was the first time she realized what had been happening to Jews. “I saw a soldier pull a little baby from the arms of his mother and throw him away on the ground. The screams of her, I never forget,” Opdyke said. “I felt I want to jump up and take him by the throat and squeeze that monster. But I was scared. I could just stand there and cry. That night, I prayed.”

At the factory, she met the old man she now refers to simply as Major. He was Major Edward Rugemer, an “old-fashioned German, not Gestapo or SS,” who had been recalled from retirement for his knowledge of munitions. “He was a German, but he was not a killer,” she said. A loyal officer, he nevertheless argued with the S.S. and Gestapo officers that theirs was a war against women and children, she said.

They met when Opdyke, who was anemic, fainted in front of him during an inspection. “He asked me questions. I spoke quite good German since I grew up by the border. He asked if I was descended from Germans. I say I don’t know. He was taken I was so honest.

“I pleaded with him to forgive me fainting. I say I want to work. I say give me another job.”

Gave Her Job

He gave her a job in an officers’ barracks serving breakfasts, lunches and dinners to German officers and washing their clothes. As the German front advanced to the Russian border, she followed the Major to Tarnopole, a town in the Ukraine that had a factory of 300 mostly Jewish workers and a ghetto where they lived, she said. It is now in the Soviet Union.

There, dividing her time between the officers’ mess and the laundry room where Jewish people worked, she said she became “the eyes and ears for the Jewish people working there.”

While serving dinner, she overheard Gestapo officers planning raids on ghettos, and she told the laundry room workers. “We started a grapevine information center. Many of them escaped when the time came for the raid. . . .”

One day in July, 1943, she overheard plans to liquidate the ghetto where her friends in the laundry room lived. When she told them, they asked for her help. “It was so hard to know that if I don’t do something, they will be dead. But what could I do? I lived alone in a tiny room. . . . The only thing for me to do was pray.

“But then a miracle! A couple days later, the Major called me in and says he has a villa, and he wants me to be his housekeeper.”

From the laundry workers, she learned the villa was rumored to have been built at the start of Hitler’s invasion by a Jewish architect who built a servants’ quarters in the cellar and a secret crawl space from the cellar to a room underneath the villa’s gazebo.

Opdyke said she knew then she was “put in the right place at the right time.”

At night she opened the window to the cellar. One by one, her Jewish friends came to the window and slid down the coal chute into the cellar. They included: Mosie Lifshitz, a doctor; Ida and Lazer Haller, a married couple; Norman Weise, a lawyer; Clara Bower, a nurse; Abraham Steiner, a businessman; Henry Weinbaum and Fanka Zilberman, Opdyke recalled.

Had Only Key

On June 22, 1943, all ghetto inhabitants who had not escaped were killed, she said. For eight months, the 12 escapees lived in the servants’ quarters, which Opdyke always kept locked. She had the only key.

They helped her with kitchen chores. Opdyke brought them food from the officers’ mess where she still worked and from the large quantities of food she ordered for the Major’s parties. In addition, one of the escapees, Weinbaum, had a Polish wife, Helena, who lived nearby in the forest and brought them potatoes.

There was a small storage room in the servants’ quarters that the group called “Honeymoon Hotel.” It was for the Weinbaums and the other married couple, the Hallers. While in hiding, Ida Haller became pregnant. The doctor and the nurse came to Opdyke asking her to get medication to “disrupt the pregnancy.”

“They said, ‘Look, this cannot happen, a baby would cry,’ ” Opdyke said.

Opdyke said she had seen so many children die, she could not bear to have “that little life thrown away.”

“I pleaded with her, ‘Please don’t do it. You’ll be free when your time comes.’ ” The couple decided to have the baby.

“I was a young girl with high principals, but I was stupid,” Opdyke said. “I didn’t think about danger. I so strongly believed what (Hitler’s troops) did was so wrong that everything have to come right. . . .”

One day in September, Opdyke was in town shopping when “from nowhere” the Gestapo started pushing Polish people to the marketplace, where they were to witness a Polish couple and their son, 8, and daughter, 14, hang with a Jewish couple and their 5-year-old son, whom the Polish couple had harbored.

“They (the Gestapo) said this is what happens when you befriend Jews,” Opdyke said. They forced us to watch. You can’t watch things like that. Even with your eyes closed, you can hear. . . .”

She returned to the villa shaken. Usually, she left the key in the door so the Major would have to ring the bell when he arrived. This time, she forgot. She opened the door to the cellar as usual, and five women came out to help her.

Major Saw Them

“A couple minutes later, the door opened and the Major was standing in the kitchen. He didn’t say one word. His cheeks were trembling. He was looking from one to another with unbelief. He turned around and walked to his library. We were standing like statues, scared to breathe.

“I knew I had to go in and face him. There was no other way I could do. He was yelling at me: ‘I trusted you. I give you nice home and protection and everything.’ I cry and told him they are my friends. Nobody has the right to kill because of race or religion. I said please forgive me. I did not have my home to take them.”

She also reminded him the Russians were pushing the Germans back to Poland, and the outcome of the war now looked uncertain.

“He said, ‘You know what will happen to you?’ I said, ‘Yes, I witnessed this morning. If you cannot forgive me, I have to give my life, there’s nothing I can do.’ At that point, he said, ‘Irene, I am an old man. I’ve seen enough killing and murdering.’ ”

He told her not to do anything “stupid” and said he did not want to know who else was there. Opdyke said she dropped to her knees in gratitude for his “generosity.” But, she said, “I paid the price for it.” She declined to elaborate.

By March, 1944, the Major received orders to evacuate the villa, and Opdyke and the escapees made their way to the forest. On March 18, they were liberated by the Russians. In the rush, Opdyke and the escapees never had a chance to say goodby.

Heading back for her home town, Opdyke, then 24, met an officer in a Polish partisan unit that was fighting the retreating Germans as well as the advancing Russians. “From the first time I saw him, I was in love.”

They were to be married by a forest priest on her birthday. The day before, Opdyke was trying on her wedding dress when the young man burst in, twirled her around, and said he needed to lead an attack against the Germans that afternoon.

“An hour later, I knew. Even before they knocked on the door.” He had been shot, a friend had seen him fall; he was dead.

Escaped From Russians

She devoted herself to the Polish partisans. Arrested in Russian-occupied Germany, she managed to escape to a town called Wroclaw, where she remembered the Hallers lived. They protected her for awhile, but, afraid they would be arrested by the Russians if she stayed there, they sent her to Jewish friends in Krakow.

Those friends found out for her that her father had been shot by drunken soldiers and her mother and sisters had been arrested for her escape. They gave her a false name and, with her blond hair dyed black, smuggled her to a Jewish repatriation camp in Germany.

Thinking she would never see her family again, she left for the United States in 1949.

Working one day in New York in 1955, she went to have lunch in the cafeteria of the United Nations building. There a man came up to her and said she looked familiar. When they remembered that he had been the U.N. representative who interviewed her in 1948 at the Jewish repatriation camp, he recited her story beginning to end.

His name was Bill Opdyke. Six weeks later, they were married.

The past 18 years, the Opdykes have lived in Yorba Linda. They are parents of one daughter and have two grandsons. He is retired from Chamber of Commerce work, and she still works as an interior decorator.

She now tells her story often in public--despite self-consciousness over her accent--at Rotary, Kiwanis and Lions gatherings, synagogues and public schools. The audiences are always silent and frequently tearful, her husband says.

After reading a newspaper article about one of Opdyke’s speeches in 1971, Rabbi Asa, a Holocaust historian, became intrigued. They met and he submitted her name to the Yad Vashem, which designates “Righteous Gentiles.” It took 11 years for Yad Vashem to complete the complex process of finding witnesses and verifying Opdyke’s story, said Asa.

At first it had seemed impossible. “It would take an Interpol to trace people who haven’t been around for 20 or 30 years.”

Of the 12, he said, one was in Brazil, one was in New York, one had died, another was too sick to communicate. But one, Fanka Zilberman, was in Israel. And the Hallers were traced to Munich. Their son, Roman, who was conceived in the Major’s villa, grew up hearing stories about Opdyke, the rabbi learned. In 1981, he gathered the substantiating information and presented it to Yad Vashem.

Reunited With Sisters

Opdyke has books full of snapshots of her trip last year to Poland, where she was reunited with her four sisters for the first time since 1939. Her mother died of a stroke after the war.

In her book is a photo of Roman Haller, his wife and two children. He works as a furrier, like his father, in Munich. He wrote Opdyke a letter that began “Dear Mother.” She calls him “my son.”

There are photos of Fanka Zilberman and her husband, whom Opdyke met during a trip to Tel Aviv, where they live. “They treated me like a princess,” she said.

There is a faded photo taken after the war. It shows Ida Haller and Fanka Zilberman giving the Major, wrinkled and smiling, a hug. His family, Opdyke said, later disowned him as a “Jew lover.”

A 1982 study by sociologist Samuel P. Oliner of Humboldt State University concluded that what 245 rescuers like Opdyke had in common was a high self-esteem, self-confidence and a willingness to take risks. They also had parents who taught them justice and compassion and more often than not supported their risky acts.

“Some people are blaming the Polish people for not helping,” Opdyke said. “So many people were scared. I did see the Polish couple be hung with the children and the Jewish couple with the child. I did see that when I already did have those people.

“Thinking back, I have a question for myself. Would I have the courage if I know what I do would hurt my sisters, my mother?”

But without hesitation, she says she would do it all again. “It is such a wonderful feeling to know lives are saved, life goes on, there are children and their children.”

From Yad Vashem, Opdyke also was awarded a medal of valor, which she keeps in an olive wood box lined in blue velvet. On it is a French quotation from the Talmud: Quiconque sauve une vie sauve l’univers tout entier . “Whoever saves one life saves the whole world.”