Irene Gut Opdyke (pictured above at age 17 and then as an adult) was a teenager when the Nazis invaded Poland. She began working as a nurse and then at a hotel for German officers. There she saw the Jews starving in the nearby ghetto while the Germans ate like kings and lived comfortably. This did not sit well with her so she began sneaking food under the fence at the ghetto. That was dangerous enough but an incident (which I will not repeat because it is so horrific) prompted her to stand by no longer. She began hiding Jews in the hotel and when an SS officer hired her to work in his home, she hid them in his basement. You read that right: she hid Jews in the home of an SS officer. For the rest of her story, I highly recommend her book In My Hands. She didn’t wear a uniform but when her country needed her, she stepped up. Mrs. Opdyke passed away nearly ten years ago but her acts have certainly not been forgotten.
Menachem Z. Rosensaft showed that 1945 film clip to his class on the law of genocide, at Columbia Law School, but to him, the woman in flickering black-and-white was no distant witness to history. She is his mother.
The law often tries to weigh matters clinically, but a class that dwells on atrocities cannot escape emotion. And it cannot help being personal when the professor is the Jewish son of two Holocaust survivors whose families were wiped out.
An excellent read. As Holocaust survivors pass away in old age, it is important that their stories continue to get told. There are still Holocaust deniers, and we still are not living up to the promise of “Never again.”
I think the approach this professor takes, is both necessary, and hopefully will be taken up by other educators and world leaders.
RIP NANCY WAKE (30 August 1912 – 7 August 2011)
Ms Wake, who has died in London just before her 99th birthday, was a New Zealander brought up in Australia. She became a nurse, a journalist who interviewed Adolf Hitler, a wealthy French socialite, a British agent and a French resistance leader. She led 7,000 guerrilla fighters in battles against the Nazis in the northern Auvergne, just before the D-Day landings in 1944. On one occasion, she strangled an SS sentry with her bare hands. On another, she cycled 500 miles to replace lost codes. In June 1944, she led her fighters in an attack on the Gestapo headquarters at Montlucon in central France.
Work began earlier this month on a feature film about Nancy Wake’s life. Ms Wake, one of the models for Sebastian Faulks’ fictional heroine, Charlotte Gray, had mixed feelings about previous cinematic efforts to portray her wartime exploits, including a TV mini-series made in 1987.
“It was well-acted but in parts it was extremely stupid,” she said. “At one stage they had me cooking eggs and bacon to feed the men. For goodness’ sake, did the Allies parachute me into France to fry eggs and bacon for the men? There wasn’t an egg to be had for love nor money. Even if there had been why would I be frying it? I had men to do that sort of thing.”
Ms Wake was also furious the TV series suggested she had had a love affair with one of her fellow fighters. She was too busy killing Nazis for amorous entanglements, she said.
Even before she escaped to Britain, through Spain, in 1943 to train as a guerrilla leader, Nancy had been top of the Gestapo’s French “wanted” list. With her husband, she ran a resistance network which helped to smuggle Jews and allied airmen out of the country.
Nancy recalled later in life that her parachute had snagged in a tree. The French resistance fighter who freed her said he wished all trees bore “such beautiful fruit”. Nancy retorted: “Don’t give me that French shit.”
I probably would have never heard of this woman if it were not for Tumblr. There have been amazing women throughout history, and their stories need to be told more often. I’m astounded by her accomplishments and her gusto.
Elaine Culbertson made an amazing discovery at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, learning new details about her grandfather’s life that she never knew before.
An overview of the people and events of the Holocaust
through photographs, documents, art, music, movies, and literature
The part that I am exploring (just for my own personal interests) are the interviews with holocaust survivors and the newspaper front pages from important moments in history.
