Holocaust Rescuer Says She Was ‘Predestined’

The reunion was born of a chance encounter. It was 1995, and Irene Gut Opdyke was returning home to Yorba Linda after a visit to Israel when her seatmate on the airplane asked her why she had made the trip.

Opdyke told the man that the Israeli Holocaust Authority, Yad Vashem, had planted a tree in her honor on the Avenue of the Righteous in Jerusalem to recognize how she, a Catholic, had hidden and saved the lives of at least a dozen Jews in Poland during the Holocaust. She began to tell him her story.

“He jumped to his feet,” Opdyke recalled, “and he said to me, ‘You saved my uncle!’ ”

The fellow traveler notified his relative, Heshu Morks of Tel Aviv, Morks called Opdyke, and plans for their meeting were made.

The reunion can be seen Wednesday night on ABC-TV’s “Primetime Live,” which sent a crew with Opdyke last summer on her return trip to Israel.

Opdyke also was reunited with another person whose life she saved during the Holocaust. Roman Haller, 55, whose parents were among the 12 Jews whom Opdyke hid on the property of a Nazi major, also owes his life to Opdyke, who worked as the officer’s housekeeper.

Haller’s parents, Ida and Lazar, conceived him unintentionally while they were in hiding and were going to abort the pregnancy until Opdyke--who said she had seen the Gestapo murder babies--persuaded them not to.

“I told them, ‘Hitler will not have your baby too,’ ” Opdyke said Monday from her home. The baby, she said with tears in her eyes, “was born in freedom,” just a day before her own birthday.

“He was a present to me,” she said.

Opdyke’s story of rescuing the Jews has been told in many forums. She has been profiled in countless newspaper stories, including a front-page article in the Jerusalem Post last year, when she met with Knesset Chairman Dan Tichon and former Prime Minister Shimon Peres. In addition to being recognized as a Righteous Gentile by Israel’s government, she has been honored by the Vatican, the U.S. Memorial Holocaust Museum in Washington, and the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles. Her second autobiography--this one to be published by Alfred Knopf--is due out later this year, and her life story has been commissioned by a Hollywood agency that wants to make a feature film, she said.

Opdyke was a teenager in Poland when World War II broke out. After Poland fell, she was forced into labor at a German munitions factory, then recruited by German Maj. Eduard Rugemer to serve as a housekeeper at the officers’ compound near the factory. In the laundry room there, she befriended the 12 Jews she would eventually hide under a gazebo. She also became the “eyes and ears” for them and other Jews who lived in ghettos or hid in holes beneath trees in the forest. When the major learned that Opdyke was hiding Jews on his property, she became his mistress to keep him from turning her and the Jews in.

“It was predestined,” she said of her role in saving Jews. “I was young. I was pretty. I was blond, and I had blue eyes.” She used her appearance as a tool to assist the Jews, she said. There were so many who needed help, she often did not know the identities of the people she was saving, she said.

“I really didn’t know them,” she said, her Polish accent still evident. “But I saw people in need, and I saw I could help them.”

When she was reunited with Heshu Morks last year, “he said, ‘You saved my life three times,’ but I didn’t remember until he told me.”

The first time was while Morks--still living in the ghetto-- was one of several people sewing garments for the major. One day Morks’ wife, Pola, ran to Opdyke for help, saying that the Gestapo had picked her husband to be sent to a concentration camp. Opdyke didn’t know Morks personally but knew how to appeal to the major: by telling him that many important uniforms, as well as some dresses for his wife, would not be finished because a chief tailor was being sent off.

“So the major went and got him [Morks] off the train,” she said.

The second time Opdyke saved Morks’ life was when she told workers in the laundry room that she had overheard German plans to raid their ghetto, giving the Jews time to seek hiding places.

Morks and his wife were not among the 12 whom Opdyke secreted away on the major’s property. But she helped them a third time, nonetheless. Opdyke cooperated with another Christian woman--one who worked on a farm and had access to equipment, potatoes, bread and other necessities--to smuggle Jews into the forest inside a horse-drawn cart. The Morkses were among those taken to the forest, and they continued to receive assistance from the two Gentile women, who brought them food, blankets and other supplies.

“Summer in the forest was not so bad,” she said, “but winter was horrible.”

Morks’ wife now is ailing with Alzheimer’s, so she was unable to attend the reunion. But through the years, Opdyke has met several others whom she saved. One reunion was several years ago on the “Jerry Springer Show” (“He was good at that time,” Opdyke said). That is where she first saw a grown-up Roman Haller, the baby whose abortion she fought against.

Today, Opdyke said proudly, Haller is president of B’nai B’rith in Munich.

The reunion in Tel Aviv with Morks was intensely emotional, she said.

The past is so painful for Morks that he rarely talks about it, even with his family, said Alan Boinus, a friend who, with his wife, accompanied Opdyke on last year’s trip.

“He made an exception to see Irene,” Boinus said. “He opened the door on his past for her.”

Opdyke described the reunion as full of “incredible love. The bond goes to the deepest part of a human’s soul.”

While Morks keeps his past private, Opdyke has taken the opposite tack, spreading the word of tolerance and the evils of hate to churches, synagogues, schools, any venue where someone will listen.

Boinus and his wife started the Irene Gut Opdyke Holocaust Rescuer Foundation, to offer rewards, grants and scholarships to young people who take a stand against bigotry and make a difference in their community.

After she and others who lived through the Holocaust die, Opdyke said, there must be others who will continue to fight against the hatred that ruled during World War II.

“I do this,” she said, “for the children, for they are the future.”