Chronicling a Heroic Life

Irene Gut Opdyke, a soft-spoken Polish emigree in her late 70s, is as likely to kiss as to shake hands with a person she is meeting for the first time. 'God made me a peacemaker,' she says, and her voice expresses such conviction as to hint at the extraordinary role she played more than 50 years ago. A 17-year-old Catholic nursing student when Germany invaded Poland, she put her own life at risk from the moment the war began. By the time she was 21 she had been a prisoner of both the Russians and the Germans -- and she had saved the lives of numerous Jews, including 12 whom she hid and protected in a villa occupied by a Wehrmacht officer for whom she had been made to keep house.

Charged with drama, reversals of fate and heroic courage, the remarkable story of Opdyke's wartime experiences, the subject of In My Hands: Memories of a Holocaust Rescuer (Knopf, Aug.), might seem an obvious choice for publication. But In My Hands was conceived carefully and slowly, by means that were not obvious at all.

Opdyke, for more than 20 years a popular speaker for the United Jewish Appeal and other organizations, regularly transfixes audiences in synagogues, churches and schools: she wants people, especially young people, to learn from history and to summon courage in the presence of hate. For years listeners had urged her to write about her experiences. In 1992 she published Into the Flames: The Life Story of a Righteous Gentile , written with Jeffrey Elliot (Borgo Press). It was a work of more historical than literary interest, and three or four years ago, a man who had been moved by Opdyke's speaking began to try to interest major publishers in Opdyke's life story. Among the editors he approached was Nancy Siscoe, then at HarperCollins Children's Books.

Siscoe was immediately intrigued. 'It was a fabulous story, and a really important one,' she says. 'At the time I hadn't read a whole lot of Holocaust literature, just the obvious things, and I hadn't even heard of a Holocaust rescuer. Irene's story was one of the first that told me what it was like to be an everyday person in Poland at the time, how much destruction and chaos there was for all these people aside from the Jews, and how hard it was to help. This story actually elevates humanity, in my eyes. It leaves you realizing, Yes, there are good people in the world, yes, there is altruism.'

A `Literary' Story

She also perceived the story as 'intensely literary,' marked by recurring motifs and startling ironies. To do it justice, Siscoe wanted to bring in not a ghostwriter but a proven, literary author who would receive equal billing.But HarperCollins did not think Siscoe's plan feasible; without the house's support, she was unable to search for a co-author, and reluctantly turned the project down. In late 1996, however, Siscoe moved to Knopf and Crown Books for Young Readers, and Opdyke's friend called her again. Siscoe was just as interested as before, and this time, her colleagues were as eager as she was.

At first she considered authors with a Holocaust background, but set aside that strategy. 'Some of the people had already written their big Holocaust book or had perhaps too personal a connection to it,' Siscoe explains. 'Someone without that background would be more able to slip into Irene's vision. This isn't a Holocaust story or a rescuer's story -- it's Irene's story, and we wanted her voice to come out.'

Eventually, Simon Boughton, the division's publisher, proposed one of his own authors, Jennifer Armstrong, whose Civil War-era novels The Dreams of Mairhe Mehan and Mary Mehan Awake Siscoe had just finished reading. 'It was like a lightning bolt,' Siscoe says. 'I knew that Jennifer could set herself in another time and show you what it felt like to be there.'

Armstrong was quick to accept Siscoe's offer. Irene's story was, she says, very compelling, and the timing was fortuitous. The Mairhe Mehan books and the novel she had written before that had left Armstrong feeling 'kind of exhausted, as a fiction writer,' and she had recently turned to nonfiction (Shipwreck at the Bottom of the World, Jan.). In the spring of 1997 she signed a contract with Knopf, and spent the summer preparing to interview Opdyke at Opdyke's home in Yorba Linda, Calif.

Armstrong, who is from a 'very New England-y family background,' says that the Holocaust 'was not something I had much awareness of before college'; she 'had a lot of catching-up to do.' She used Opdyke's Into the Flames as a starting point, and read many more memoirs. She researched Polish history, political science and sociological studies about rescuers, and she even listened to Polish tapes, to develop an ear for the rhythms of the language. By the time she arrived at Opdyke's door, she had 30 or 40 pages of questions.

Opdyke and Armstrong spent a week together. 'Breakfast, lunch, dinner,' says Opdyke fondly. Every morning the two sat down at Opdyke's dining table with a tape recorder, and Armstrong would ask questions.

'I approached the project with a certain amount of trepidation,' Armstrong recalls. To break the ice, she had brought color photocopies of scenes from a Polish guidebook: 'Little girls in folk costumes, typical architecture, landscapes, religious artifacts,' she says. 'The first day I showed her one picture after another, saying, `D s this remind you of anything?' `Did you ever go to a church that looks like this?' '

The photos evoked previously forgotten memories of Opdyke's that Armstrong would layer into the book; they also provided her with a more intimate filter to interpret Opdyke's responses to questions about the war. 'I knew Irene had told her story many times, and I wasn't sure if she would go on automatic pilot,' Armstrong says. 'When we did get to the actual story, it was surrounded by a much more three-dimensional portrait.'

At the end of their week together, Armstrong returned to her home in upstate New York and immersed herself in writing. 'It was a bigger job than I had realized. To sit at your desk, day after day, imaginatively putting yourself into these situations... I'm glad I did it, but it was often unpleasant work.'

Even with its frequently painful material, the book has uncanny delicacy; what would be graphic in another writer's work is often metaphorical here, piercing the reader with what is not said. The message, true to Opdyke's vision, is redemptive.

Opdyke had been given consultation rights for the book, but not final approval. 'Of course,' Siscoe adds, 'if she'd had a problem, we would not have gone ahead. We had a moral obligation to get this right, more than any contract could have specified.' She read the manuscript for the first time last summer, after Armstrong and Siscoe felt it was virtually complete. 'Jennifer did a beautiful job,' says Opdyke. She herself, she thinks, was too close to her own story to write it effectively. 'I speak and then I cry. Jennifer was able to capture my feelings, my neshamah,' she says, using the Yiddish word for soul.

'Irene has every reason to be bitter,' comments Armstrong, 'but she's the furthest thing from bitter that I've ever met.' Instead, Opdyke is grateful. 'I am the richest woman in the world,' she says. 'I asked God for an opportunity to help, even if my life depended on it. And God put me in the right place at the right time.'