In My Hands: Memories of a Holocaust Rescuer

Irena is taken to the commissariat and placed in a small, windowless room, where her feelings alternate between terror and a sense of “detachment,” as if “some part of me […] could not believe it was real” (62). After several hours she is led to the commissar’s office, where the two soldiers who saw her in the park are waiting. One of them tells the commissar “That is the spy Irena, who worked in the hospital” (63). They search and question her but do not find the train ticket tucked into her brassiere. She responds to their questions truthfully, but the commissar refuses to believe her and continues to ask what the Polish partisans are planning.

Finally, the commissar says he believes Irena, and because she is “young and pretty—so helpless” (67), he has decided to help her. He says she can stay with a friend until Dr. Ksydzof returns to Ternopol. An officer is assigned to escort Irena to her friend’s house, and she leads him to a random building, where he leaves. As soon as he’s gone, she makes her way to the train station. She still has her transit pass, and because the trains have been delayed, she finds that her train has not left yet.

She takes the train across the border to German territory, where the German soldiers force everyone off the train at gunpoint, into a quarantine camp where “the indignities” take her “breath away—inspection, disinfection, segregation, humiliation” (71). After contracting influenza and spending time in the infirmary, Irena is finally given new documents and a pass for the train, and she travels in a cattle car where she sees glimpses of “purple lilacs bowing in the breeze” (73)—a reminder of prewar life that leaves her in tears. She reaches Radom to find much of the city destroyed by the bombing, but she finds her way to her aunt Helen’s house, where she sees her mother and father at last.

Irena is overjoyed to see her parents and sisters again. She learns that Aunt Helen’s husband was killed in the fighting, and her father has lost his job. Despite fleeing from their home to the relatively “independent” General Gouvernement of Poland, Irena’s family lives “like slaves,” threatened with the death penalty for breaking curfew or even showing a “hostile mentality”—and especially for helping the Jews (80).

Irena’s sister Janina takes her through Radom, where she now sees German soldiers, “swastika-studded signs” (82) everywhere, and posters denouncing the Jews, “who were linked to every depravity and sin” (83). Janina shows Irena the Jewish ghetto, complete with barbed-wire fences, where all Jews from the area are now forced to live.

Irena’s nineteenth birthday arrives, and she registers for work, ending up in a small Polish-run shop. In June, news arrives that Germany and the Soviet Union are at war; in July, German soldiers come to take Irena’s father away, claiming they need him to run the ceramics factory he designed in Kozłowa Góra. Her mother decides to take the three youngest sisters to live with their father, but she will not take Irena and Janina because of rumors that Polish women with Germanic features are forced to work in brothels.

Time passes, and Irena and Janina hear of more and more acquaintances caught in roundups, carted off by the Germans and put to work. Meanwhile, more Jews are arriving, marched in lines into the Walowa and Glinice ghettos. The sisters hear no news from their family and their lives are consumed with worry, work and hunger. One Sunday, Irena looks for comfort in a church, but German soldiers arrive and force the churchgoers, including Irena, into troop transport vehicles, carrying them away. 

The transport vehicle has returned Irena to Radom, where she is put to work in an ammunition factory, placed under guard, and given no wages; she has become “a slave,” as she puts it (94). One morning, the major who chose Irena to work at this factory is inspecting the workers, and Irena faints from weakness. She comes to in an office, where the major, Eduard Rügemer, says he can give her a better job because she speaks German well. He tells her to report to Herr Schulz for work and allows her to return to her family.

Schulz runs a former hotel kitchen, now a German officers’ dining hall, and he needs Irena to interpret with Polish tradesmen and delivery men. Schulz turns out to be a “good, friendly man” (98) who provides Irena and her family with extra food. One day, while setting tables, Irena realizes she can see into the Jewish ghetto. She spots Jews fleeing and German soldiers shooting them, a scene “like an anthill kicked to pieces” (102). Schulz tells her never to speak of what she’s seen, warning her that “bad things happen to Jew-lovers,” and Irena realizes with horror that she has “just seen the Germans’ answer to their ‘Jewish problem’” (103).

Irena returns to work “confused and heartsick” (104), now aware of the horrors occurring in the Jewish ghetto so close to the hotel, which is just down an alley and on the other side of a fence. Irena smuggles some cheese and apples out of the hotel, digs a hole under the fence, and leaves the food there, despite knowing “whoever helps a Jew shall be punished by death” (105). The next day she finds her box of food empty, and she continues to leave food every day. 

At the end of the year, Peter, Irena’s former neighbor, stops by on his way to the front, as he has been conscripted into the German army. He brings a letter from Irena’s mother, who reveals Irena’s sisters are “being worked as slaves in the clay mines” (106), and the Germans won’t let Irena’s father leave. Distraught over what’s happening to her younger sisters, Irena decides she must at least protect Janina by keeping her close, so she asks Schulz to hire Janina. As 1942 arrives, Janina begins working beside Irena.

In the spring, Irena learns that as the German army is moving east, the munitions factory and domestic staff, including Irena and Janina, will relocate as well. Ironically enough, Irena finds she will return to Ternopol, a place she “had done nothing for the last two springs but try to leave” (107).

One day in March, before leaving Radom, Irena sees bulldozers “crawling across the rubble that had been the [Jewish] ghetto” (108). Noticing little signs of the ghetto’s former life—“a crushed hat, a burst suitcase” (108)—Irena is horrified to hear a loudspeaker proclaiming that Radom is now “Jew-free” (109).

As Irena prepares to move, she thinks about her Jewish friends from childhood. She believes that once Hitler has dealt with the Jews, he will “turn his full attention to the rest of us Poles” (110).

Irena and Janina travel to temporary barracks in Lvov, as the new factory in Ternepol is not yet completed. Irena turns twenty, and Janina surprises her with a bouquet of lilacs, reminding her of “old, sweet times” (111). Irena’s despair over the horrors of war occasionally lead her to church, where one day, she befriends a young Polish woman named Helen Weinbaum. Helen says that her husband was taken to a work camp for Jews, and while she is not Jewish, she wishes she were, so she could be with her husband.

Irena, Janina and Helen become friends and visit each other throughout the spring, until Irena “began to feel I had another sister” (113). One day, Helen hears that many Jews from the work camp have been rounded up and are being held in a village nearby, and Helen begs the sisters to come with her and look for Henry. They arrive to find the Jews being unloaded from trucks behind a barbed-wire fence, in what was once the village marketplace. Taking shelter in an abandoned home, the women watch from a window as the Jews are forced out the fence gates, as though “through a gauntlet,” with those who stumble being shot until “the street was paved with bodies” (116-117).

As the surviving prisoners are led out of town, the women follow them. Soon, they hear shooting. Knowing all these prisoners are dead, the three return home with their “souls crushed,” having seen something so terrible that “it was not possible to say with words what we had witnessed” (118).