Irena's Vow

© 2024 by Dan Gordon

All Rights Reserved

Cover Design by Quiver Distribution

This book is a work of fiction. People, places, events, and situations are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or historical events, is purely coincidental.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author and publisher.

Regalo Press

New York • Nashville

posthillpress.com

Published in the United States of America

Contents

Author’s Note

Part I:   Irena Gut

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Part II:   The German Major’s Villa

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-one

Chapter Twenty-two

Chapter Twenty-three

Chapter Twenty-four

Chapter Twenty-five

Chapter Twenty-six

Chapter Twenty-seven

Chapter Twenty-eight

Chapter Twenty-nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-one

Chapter Thirty-two

Chapter Thirty-three

Chapter Thirty-four

Chapter Thirty-five

Chapter Thirty-six

Chapter Thirty-seven

Chapter Thirty-eight

Chapter Thirty-nine

Chapter Forty

Chapter Forty-one

Chapter Forty-two

Part III:   Peace

Chapter Forty-three

Afterword

Acknowledgments

About the Author

AUTHOR’S NOTE

This is not a biography. It is a novel. I have altered timelines here and there, changed names and events as I felt necessary to tell a compelling story.

Over her lifetime, Irene wrote two autobiographical books, one with Jennifer Armstrong, In My Hands: Memories of a Holocaust Rescuer, and the other was co-authored by Jeffrey M. Elliot, Into the Flames: The story of a Righteous Gentile. Both are recommended for anyone wanting to learn more about Irene’s incredible life.

For Irene

Part I

Irena Gut

Chapter One

She was an old woman, beautiful in the way old women are beautiful. But she was not without vanity. There was a time when heads turned as Irena entered a room. Men’s heads, and women’s too. Some women watched her pass by out of envy, others out of lust.

It was a degenerate time. Blood in the air lent everything an urgency. Handsome men in officer’s uniforms with pomaded hair, freshly shaven cheeks scented with eau de cologne, which most called Kolnisch Vasser, looked up from their cigarettes as they lit them, and followed her with their eyes.

The junior officers could only afford Eckstein Da Capo cigarettes, which was ironic, Irena thought, since Eckstein and his partner Breslauer were both Jews. Those same junior officers joked that Eckstein and Breslauer, their descendants, and their cigarettes, would all go up in smoke anyway, so what did it matter?

Before the invasion of France, the officers had drunk a German sparkling wine called Rotkappchen. It came from a village on the Unstrap River. While they called it champagne, Herr Schultze, an innkeeper before the war and a connoisseur of French wines, declared it was nothing more than dishwater with fizz.

Then Hitler invaded Denmark and Norway.

Denmark surrendered the day it was invaded, and by the early summer of 1940 German Army majors and SS sturmbannfuhrers were washing down Danish pickled herring with Aalborg’s Aquavit direct from Copenhagen.

By late July, the Germans had switched to Godiva chocolates from Belgium and Gouda and Edam cheeses from the Netherlands, served after meals with real French Champagne.

After the invasion of France and the British defeat at Dunkirk, even Wehrmacht second lieutenants were drinking the occasional Taitinger and smoking Rothman’s English cigarettes.

That’s how Irena found out all of Europe had fallen.

The Germans had switched from sauerkraut and beer.

Chapter Two

Poland was no more. The Germans now called it The Incorporated Eastern Territories, and within its borders they opened the death camp Auschwitz-Birkenau. More than a million people would be murdered there—nine hundred thousand of them Jews, two hundred thousand were children. By the summer of 1945, the Nazis would murder 1.5 million Jewish children in the death camps and ghettoes of occupied Europe.

If you took all the wars America fought, all the soldiers who had been killed in the Revolutionary War, all the ones killed in the Civil war, in World War I and World War II, all the American soldiers who were killed in Korea and Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, when you added them all together, all those soldiers in all those wars, in over two hundred years of killing, it was still less than the number of Jewish children the Nazis killed between 1940 and 1945.

These were random thoughts as Irena waited in the wings to be introduced by the high school principal, a strongly built Black man in his middle forties, who looked as if he was hired as much for his physicality as his academic resume—understandable, as this was a tough school in the tough L.A. neighborhood of South Central. Irena’s family and friends told her she was insane going into schools like that to speak in her Polish accent about what had happened to Europe’s Jews while the world shrugged its shoulders half a century before.

She’d only been speaking at the schools for a little over a year, but now, she said, in an accent that sounded remarkably like Zsa Zsa Gabor, Even the big macho schoolboys would come to me after I am speaking for a hug. And I tell them ‘I love you, honyeh!’ which was as close to the word honey as her accent would allow her to get. And they are all with tears in the eyes. Especially the big macho boys!

She didn’t have to force herself to remember what for almost fifty years she’d tried to forget. Nightmares danced in daylight but ruled her midnight hours.

Irena surrendered to the long-ago sounds of hobnailed boots on cobblestones, the shouted orders, the screams, the smells of rotted fruit and terror-sweat in the alleyway where farmer’s wives sold produce and the occasional bloodied carcass hung of whatever animal Germans had not yet stolen, as the SS leapt down from truck gates crashing open, their wolfen dogs straining at the leash, fangs bared, froth dripping, barking at women who screamed to a god for salvation that did not come.

Off the streets! Sturmbannfuhrer Rokita shouted, his gray-green uniform immaculate, death’s head cap peaked at just the right angle, watching his reflection in the dead Jewish butcher’s shop window. Off the streets!

Poles in the Tarnopol¹ marketplace obeyed the orders and scattered. In an instant the streets were empty. Fruit stalls were deserted where moments before hausfraus had haggled over the price of tomatoes per gram. In the yellow- and cream-colored buildings lining the square and alleyways, shutters slammed shut.

Then came the screams, the sobs, the sounds of hobnails, quick marching, of Jews pushed, Jews driven like cattle and cursed before rifle butts and barking dogs, Jews beaten.

All right, students, settle down. Irena hears the principal’s voice, and she tries to push the memory aside. Settle down. I’m pleased to introduce our speaker this morning.

His voice faded in her head as women, children, and old people stumbled beneath truncheons, cracking skulls. And there was always the terrible sounds of barking dogs.

Irena doesn’t hear her name spoken, but she knows it’s time to walk out of the wings to the podium where bored black and brown faces stare at her absently from the audience below. Here and there a hand clap or two, a yawn, someone laughs.

Good morning, my dahlink children, she says in her Zsa Zsa-accented voice. I am so happy to be with you here today, to see so many beautiful young faces. She remembers the faces of children who never survived their childhoods, who had been robbed of all that the children who had not been selected, who had not been herded into ghettoes, took for granted.

In the ghettoes of Europe, Jews young and old starved, and learned to step over bodies of the dead who they once knew as neighbors, brothers, sisters, parents.

I look at you, and it seems to me it cannot be so very long ago that I was your age, and the world was younger than it would ever be again. I want to tell you the story of a young girl who was close to your ages right now.

Irena fights to silence the screams in her mind: the Juden raus! and the handsome young officer’s whistle he keeps on blowing in her mind, the tiny voices, the banshee cries of Mama! Mamaleh!

And this young girl, she says, had to make an important choice. She had to choose between life and death.

The yawns stop. No laughter now. These inner-city kids also know Death. They’ve seen it, heard its rattle in the throats of brothers, sisters, neighbors, friends, strangers.

This young girl did see people murdered in front of her.

Irena can still picture the young soldier behind the machine gun at the edge of the pit, naked men and women, parents covering their naked children’s eyes, bodies falling, here and there a hand still moving, still alive.

Hidden behind a wall, the girl watched old peoples and young, mens and womens and little childrens, murdered in front of her, and she said nothing, did nothing. But what could she say or do? If she said anything, did anything, she would be killed as well. And so, she stayed silent in that moment. Not a word, not a whisper. But she made a vow to God that if He ever put into her hands the chance to save a life, to do something, then she would not be silent, she would do it! If He put it into her hands.

The hard young faces softened, no longer smirking, leaning forward as she spoke.

This girl was almost exactly your age when God put her at a crossroad and offered her the choice between a moral and an immoral life, between complicity and redemption, between life and death.

The shovels and the bulldozer idled as lime was poured into the pit over the bodies. As the girl watched from behind the wall, shots rang out here and there, aimed at those still moving.

This girl, she did not ask for it, but God put into her hands the lives of twelve people, and she was not much older than you. She did not know if they would live, or if they did, how many would live, how many would die. And she was not so much very older than you, my dear children, when her world forever changed.

No noise now in the auditorium. No shuffling of feet, all of them waiting for each word.

"I know this story very well because I was there. In those days, I was a young girl, beautiful and blond haired—not from a bottle, you know, but real. I was a Polish Catholic girl from a good family, with a father I could twist around my baby finger. I was studying to be a nurse when Hitler and Stalin decided to make a deal, to rip apart the belly of my beloved Poland, like two dogs with a piece of meat. I had not spoken of these things for almost fifty years, but then one night on the television I heard a person—a polite, supposedly educated man, yet he was a Holocaust denier. The man spoke so calmly, such a seemingly reasonable man, who said, ‘You know, it never happened.’

"Well, I can tell you, it happened!

And that’s when I said, ‘Now I must speak! For the sake of that girl, and the twelve lives that were put into her hands. Now is the time to tell what happened.’

When the last of the Jews were dead, the Nazis marched off in formation, leaving behind a bulldozer pushing mounds of earth into the pit, covering the corpses. And from behind the wall, Irena watched until the bulldozer drove off and the ground healed like a fresh scar over the pit.

Then she saw a strange plant grow up out of the earth like a stubborn weed pushing up through a cement sidewalk. Fingers clawed up through the earth, a strange crop trying, struggling … then stilled. Terrified, she watched but could not move.

¹ These days Tarnopol is called Ternopil, and it is now within the borders of Western Ukraine.

Chapter Three

Radom was a pleasant town in Central Poland, neither big nor small, pleasant in the manner of such Polish towns. Trees lined neatly laid out streets lined with big houses, small houses, town squares, and cobbled streets. It began as a trade settlement, the old route between Rus and Lithuania to Malopolska, Little Poland, and Silesia. In 1724, laws were enacted establishing " de non tolerandis Judaeis ," meaning Jews were not allowed to live or trade there except for the occasional fairs.

But with the reforms of Alexander Weikopolski in 1862 and the declaration of the National Government in 1863, Jews were granted permission to live within the township and were ensured of equal status.

They built a cemetery, a hospital, schools, libraries, and a single sex gymnasium for men in 1917. A year later they built one for women. An eight-class co-educational gymnasium was established in 1928. By the eve of World War II, almost forty percent of Radom was Jewish.

There were 668 craft workshops and ninety larger industrial workshops which employed forty-five hundred workers, Jews, and non-Jews laboring together. The town thrived in no small part because of the Jewish entrepreneurs working in milling and tobacco. There were brickyards run by Shmuel Adler and the Stajnberg Brothers, tanneries run by the Ejzmans and Gutman Brothers, furniture factories owned by Gotfryd and Sons, Gieycz and Sons, Kohn and Sons, and mills run by the Frydmans, the Gromans and Kirszenbaums. The Jews of Radon worked in textiles and tailoring; they were shoemakers and hairdressers. There were professionals as well, lawyers and teachers, doctors, dentists, and notaries. They published eighteen newspapers: five in Polish and thirteen in Yiddish or Hebrew.

There was a local legend of King Kazimierz, a peaceful man who built a palace for his true love, Esther, a beautiful Jewish girl just like the Esther of the Bible. The Esterka House was still there in Radom at Ryneck 5, just like in the legend.

It was a pleasant town for Jew and Gentile alike.

Irena Gut had been raised there in a prosperous family. Her father owned a factory which made electric light poles. He was an educated Gentile man whose business partner was a Jew. The children of both families were best friends. There were five daughters in Irena’s family, and she was the baby, doted on, spoiled, loved.

At seventeen she decided to study nursing. On September 1, 1939, she was a pretty girl in her uniform—the cap and cape of a student nurse, fresh-faced, blond, blue-eyed—walking confidently down a pleasant street, in a pleasant town in September 1939 when the wall of the building next to her exploded.

It was the first of countless German bombs dropped on the city.

There was a shriek and a sound— a wave hitting, invisible, as if from a vengeful ocean. The world exploded, concrete chunks like jagged cannonballs blowing apart what the bomb left intact.

The wave knocked Irena to the ground like a hammer, leaving a copper taste in her mouth. Screams were followed by silence, ears ringing, not hearing, underwater-sounding silence, muffled screams, lips moving without speaking without crying. She stood and saw that around her were bodies: some legless, obscene, intestines like sausages, blank eyes, others writhing, blood everywhere.

Run, you little idiot! a man shouted, his bald head pierced with shards of glass, blood streaming. Run!

But what…? She heard her voice without knowing why she had spoken up or what she was trying to ask. But what…?

It’s war! he yelled back at her.

By September 8 the German army had entered Radom, and all that existed in the town before the bombs, the world of schools and workshops, libraries and the eight-class co-educational gymnasium, the thirteen newspapers, the tanners and textile workers, millers, tobacconists, teachers, doctors, notaries, the partnership in the company which made electric light poles, all of it ended.

In the first hours of the first day of occupation, Irena tended to the wounded in the hospital. Some of the other girls from her nursing class were there; yet others were dead.

Official proclamations were issued.

Poland would fight on!

There were rumors of a glorious charge of Polish cavalry against German tanks led by Colonel Kazimierz Mastalerz. It wasn’t true, of course, but it was almost true. On the first day of the war Mastalerz ordered the Eighteenth Pomeranian Ulan Regiment to draw sabers and charge a unit of German infantry camped in the forest near the village of Krojanty. The German troops panicked and ran. The German advance was stopped—temporarily, until more German