Blood Relatives : ‘Sisters’ Bound by Horrors of World War Reunite a World Away

It was a rainy day in July, 1943, and Frances Gruenberg was hiding under a stack of clothing stripped from the bodies of murdered Jews. Screams surrounded her as the Germans kicked, stabbed and shot her fellow labor camp inmates.

Three days later, the killing paused and Gruenberg emerged from the dank cellar, desperate to find her family and her close friend, Irene Opdyke. But Gruenberg, whose last name was then Silbermann, was quickly captured and taken to a long hall to await transport to a nearby town, where Jews were being gassed. She begged a soldier to contact Opdyke, her Gentile friend who worked as housekeeper for a German major. The two had hit it off immediately when they met a year earlier in the laundry room of the officer’s house, where Gruenberg also had worked.

When Opdyke, whose maiden name was Gut, got word from the labor camp that her friend “Fanka” was being held, she immediately pulled strings with the major, who had the 22-year-old Jewish woman freed. For the rest of the war, the lives of the two friends would be intimately intertwined as Opdyke, then 21, secreted Gruenberg and 11 other Jews away in the basement of the officer’s villa.

Their relationship was shattered by the chaos following World War II, when they lost contact. But now, 48 years later, they are reunited at Opdyke’s home in Yorba Linda. For the next two weeks, as they vacation in Orange County, they will remember the horror they lived through and the friendship that sustained them.

“She was an angel,” Gruenberg said Tuesday, tears coming to her eyes. Opdyke hugged her tightly and said: “I love you, Fanka.” Throughout the telling of their story, the two--who call each other “sister”--held hands, carrying on as though they had never separated.

The women believe it’s vital that their story be told. For the last six years, Opdyke has traveled the country, speaking to churches, synagogues, schools and clubs about her experiences.

“All I want to do in my life is bring people together regardless of their race or religion or creed or sex,” said Opdyke, speaking with a slight Polish accent. “We need to learn never to hate again. The children need to learn that.”

It was, in fact, through her tireless campaigning that Opdyke was reunited with her long-lost friend.

While speaking in Atlantic City, N.J., a friend of Gruenberg’s heard Opdyke tell of how she had saved four Jewish families during the war, an act for which she was later named a Righteous Gentile by the Israeli Holocaust Commission. Only 5,000 others have been so honored for their work to save Jews during the war.

The friend told Gruenberg, who lives in New York and immediately recognized herself in the story, Opdyke told the audience. With the help of several Jewish organizations, the two were reunited in March in a media blitz that precluded their actually being able talk with one another. The two hope this vacation together will remedy that.

“It is important that you understand what it was like,” Gruenberg told a visitor. “For a young girl, who is educated in the best (schools) and has many friends and is considered a person to suddenly be treated like a dog--how can that happen? Education is the only way to prevent it from happening again.”

They were thrown together by the war. Opdyke was living in a Polish town near the German border and was studying to be a nurse when the Nazis conquered the country in 1939. She fled to a nearby forest, where she was captured and raped by Russian soldiers. Russia, then allied with Germany, had also invaded.

After spending a year recovering and working in a Russian hospital, Opdyke tried to make her way home, but was captured by the Germans in 1942 and taken to Ternopol, a city in southeast Poland. There, working as the major’s housekeeper, she met Gruenberg, who labored in the laundry room during the day and spent her evenings in the labor camp outside of town.

In the house, Opdyke often heard the Germans talk of raids they planned on the town’s Jewish ghetto. She passed the tips to Gruenberg, who warned the other Jews of the pending attacks.

When word came in the summer of 1943 that the Nazis planned to destroy the forced labor camp where many of Ternopol’s Jews were housed, Opdyke opened up the officer’s villa to four Jewish families, an act that risked death.

“I was a young girl, I didn’t know I was being a hero,” Opdyke said.

For eight months, the 12 Jews hid in the basement, helping Opdyke prepare food for the lavish parties the major threw for top Gestapo officials. But one day, Opdyke left open the cellar door and the major discovered the Jews. He threatened to report them unless Opdyke went to bed with him. With lives at stake, she reluctantly complied.

“I don’t hate him. I have forgiven him,” Opdyke said.

In time, the German invasion of Russia collapsed. In 1944, the major prepared to evacuate Ternopol. Opdyke persuaded a member of the Polish underground living in a nearby forest to hide the families in a bunker. Shortly after the Jews were hidden, now with the underground, Opdyke was forced to accompany the major as the Germans retreated.

The two friends met once again in Krakow at the war’s end in 1945, but in the confusion, they lost contact. Gruenberg, whose entire family died during the war, moved to Vienna, immigrating to the United States in 1951. She married, had a son and settled in New York.

Meanwhile, Opdyke moved to southern Germany, where she lived until immigrating to the United States in 1949, soon marrying her husband, William. They settled in Yorba Linda in the late 1950s and have lived there since.

“I don’t know how we did it. It sounds inconceivable that people could live through what we lived through,” Gruenberg said, sitting close to Opdyke. “We didn’t have time to think. We acted on instinct.”