‘Righteous Gentile’ : Jews Repay Debt to a Heroine From Days of Gestapo Terror

The penalty for helping Jews escape the German Gestapo during World War II was death.

But that did not stop Polish teen-ager Irene Opdyke from hiding 12 Jewish friends in the basement of a German officer’s villa, where she worked as a housekeeper. She saved countless other Jews by sharing information she overheard from Gestapo officers planning roundups in Jewish communities.

In gratitude to Opdyke, who is 68 and lives in Yorba Linda, administrators at the Jewish Home for the Aged in Reseda violated all their admissions policies and admitted the heroine’s husband into their Alzheimer’s disease unit last week. William Opdyke, 80, will be one of only a handful of non-Jews at the home, which provides communal living for senior citizens from throughout Los Angeles County. He will also be one of the only people ever admitted directly into an intensive nursing care unit there.

Typically, a requirement for admittance to the 875-bed facility in the San Fernando Valley has been that the residents be able to care for themselves.

Said Executive Director Sheldon Blumenthal: “We violated all the rules--he’s not from our region; we are sectarian; we are so short of beds--but there are certain times when there are no rules. This is one of those times. In caring for Bill, we are repaying a debt to her. We owe her.”

Irene Opdyke’s parents had taught her to respect all people, regardless of religious or ethnic background, she said in an interview. So the teen-age nursing student was horrified when she saw how Jews were treated after Hitler’s armies invaded Poland in 1939.

Once, she said, she watched as Nazis rounded up Jews from a residential neighborhood and took them to a forest where they were shot.

“It was a nightmare that changed my life. I witnessed unbelievable things that I will never forget. The street was blocked up with barbed wire, and people were running all around. I saw a man with a white beard and a little white hat, running carrying a Torah. Little ones were screaming ‘Mama, Mama!’ ” she said. “I saw a soldier pull a baby out of its mother’s arms and throw him to the ground. Later, I heard shooting. They were killing innocent people.

“I vowed then that if the opportunity arrived, I would help.”

Opdyke took her chance while working in a German officers’ club. She was a waitress, serving meals to German military men and Gestapo agents. She also supervised the laundry crew--a dozen Jewish people. As a waitress, Opdyke overheard Gestapo agents planning roundups in Jewish neighborhoods, and she passed the information to her friends in the laundry room.

“We created a grapevine. I became the ears and eyes for the Jewish people and they spread the information around. We were able to save many lives,” Opdyke said.

Later in the war, Gestapo chatter turned from roundups to labor camps to the “final solution”--the planned liquidation of all Jews in Europe. “I knew if I didn’t help, my friends will be dead. I started praying and a miracle happened.”

A German major asked Opdyke to take a job as a housekeeper in his new villa. She accepted the job and her Jewish friends hid there for nearly 8 months. Sometimes they hid in the attic; sometimes in the basement. They also discovered a tunnel that led from the house to a small hiding space underneath the gazebo in the back yard, where they hid when the officer held large functions in his home.

But they were not always careful in the huge villa. Halfway through the 8 months, the German major came home unexpectedly and found four of the Jewish women helping Opdyke in the kitchen. Terrified that her friends would lose their lives, Opdyke pleaded with him not to turn them in.

“He put me in his lap and said ‘I will keep your secret, but you have to be mine. Give an old man his last joy in his life.’ I had to do what he said. There were too many lives at stake,” Opdyke said.

‘Righteous Gentile’

All 12 of her friends survived the Holocaust and in 1982, the Israeli Holocaust Commission honored Opdyke as a “righteous Gentile.” She is one of only 5,000 people to be so honored and the only “righteous Gentile” living in Southern California.

Jewish Home for the Aged administrators said they have a special obligation to care for Opdyke’s husband, suffering from the advanced stages of Alzheimer’s disease, because of the sacrifices she made for the Jewish people.

“She risked her life and this is the return we want to give her,” said Dena Schulman, spokeswoman for the home.

Blumenthal said: “We feel very privileged to have an opportunity to help. You can never do enough for this woman.”

Opdyke said she has heard many horror stories about nursing homes and was very worried about finding good care for her ailing husband, whom she married in 1956, shortly after arriving in the United States. She is pleased that the Jewish Home for the Aged is willing to break their rules to admit him.

“I love him, and I want him to have the best. Who but the Jewish people, who understand suffering so much, would be able to care for him so well,” she said.