Irena’s Vow

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Irena’s Vow is a 2023 film dramatizing the World War II heroism of a young Polish nursing student, Irena Gut. Irena’s Vow is a two-hour, color film. It was shot in Poland. The film is in English. It received a limited US release in April, 2024. Irena’s Vow has an 86% professional reviewer rating on Rotten Tomatoes and a 93% fan reviewer rating. Veteran reviewer Rex Reed calls Irena’s Vow “One of the most astounding holocaust stories.” He says, “It’s true, if fantastic.” The film is “anchored by the powerful, heartfelt performance of Sophie Nelisse as an innocent girl whose integrity and resolve turns her into a woman of maturity and strength.” Roman Haller, a Holocaust survivor, says, “It is a very great film. I expected a good film, but it is even more than I expected. … I saw my mother. I saw my father. I saw Irena … She was like a mother to me … I want to tell you there were people like that.”

Dr. Glenn R. Schiraldi wrote the 2007 book, World War II Survivors: Lessons in Resilience. He devoted a chapter to Irena Gut Opdyke. She was, he writes, “a diminutive, elegant woman with warm, radiant blue eyes and delicate features. She is one of the kindest, most loving women I have encountered. She reminds one of Mother Teresa. As she spoke, I often found myself choking back tears.”

Dan Gordon is a veteran screenwriter and also a former captain in the Israeli Defense Forces. Gordon says, “About 25 years ago, I was driving to my home in Los Angeles and listening to the radio. I heard a woman, Irene Gut Opdyke, telling her story. When I got home, I sat in the car in the driveway for another hour and a half, because I couldn’t stop listening.” He worked for years to get the film made.

Director Louise Archambault is a French Canadian. When she first viewed the script, she says, her reaction was “Wow. What an amazing woman. If that script had been fiction, I would have refused it” because no one would believe it. But, “I fell in love with that character.” Irena’s story is “relevant. We want to tell that story today in 2024.” Even though many films have been made about WW II, we haven’t seen, Archambault says, WW II from the eyes of a young Polish Catholic girl forced by Nazis to work for them. Approximately 1.5 million Poles were forced to work for Nazi Germany, often under slave labor conditions and at the cost of their health and their lives.

Because Archambault had a relatively meager budget of five million dollars and only twenty-nine days for shooting, she developed an intimate, rather than epic style. Irena’s Vow isn’t Saving Private Ryan; the deaths we see are of individuals; they are murdered in a sickeningly intimate way. Yes, there is horror in the story, but there is also genuine “love, hope, and light.” Archambault benefited from filming Polish actors, with a Polish crew, in Poland. They all know the history, she said; their grandparents lived it. They brought their personal experiences to the film. Also, “I put my energy on character, on human behavior.”

Events in Poland contributed to the set’s atmosphere. Refugees from Ukraine were arriving with their belongings in their hands and on their backs. “Every day we were reminded that war was going on next door.” There was a “big van” with “big guys” on the set necessary for insurance purposes. “If shooting starts here” – shooting with bullets not with cameras – “we need to get everyone out of here.”

Given how good this movie is, and how remarkable Irena’s story is, one has to wonder why the film has received so little publicity and such a limited release. I have my suspicions as to what cultural trends may have sidelined Irena’s Vow. More on that, below.

Before we talk about the film, a quick bio of Irena Gut Opdyke, in the context of world history. Before September 1, 1939, Irena Gut had lived a pleasant life. Born in 1922, she was the oldest of five daughters. Her father was a chemist and an architect. “My mother was a saint … my father was a wonderful man,” she would later say. “We were brought up in the Catholic faith. My mother really taught us the Ten Commandments … we have to be good to people and help people.” Irena also found God in nature. “There was a beautiful forest, and that was my God. I could kneel down by the beautiful tree and speak to God.”

The family could afford to hire a maid. Even so, Irena’s mother taught her daughter to cook and clean. Irena had to scrub the floor and her mother checked her daughter’s cleaning technique. Even if you marry a millionaire, Irena’s mother told her, you will still need to know how to cook and clean and maintain a pleasant home. The domestic skills Irena’s mother taught her daughter would eventually serve her in a fight for life for herself and others.

Irena told Schiraldi that her parents “taught us to help humans in need. There was always someone we had to help with food. For holidays like Christmas, we always had two or three chairs for invited guests. We helped gypsies … We brought every animal home that needed help – cats, dogs, birds.” One winter, the Gut family cellar sheltered a stork with an injured wing. Irena’s mother was skilled at rehabilitating birds. “She provided whatever old people needed – food, drink, or encouragement … Father and Mother did not distinguish among their friends – Jews, Germans, Poles – and neither did we. My parents were happy that we had many friends of different backgrounds.”

In a USC Shoah Foundation interview, Irena said she had no knowledge of the concept of “antisemitism.” “I know that we were all friends. There was no difference … In Poland, little girls were not taught politics.” She “dreamed to go to a far country to bring help.” She wanted to be like Florence Nightingale, so she became a nursing student.

On September 1, 1939, Nazi Germany invaded Poland. The week before, Hitler said, “I have placed my death-head formation in readiness – for the present only in the East – with orders to them to send to death mercilessly and without compassion, men, women, and children of Polish derivation and language. Only thus shall we gain the living space which we need.” The Nazi Generalplan Ost called for the reduction by mass killing of most Poles and the subsequent enslavement of the remnant population. Millions of Slavs, primarily Poles, Belorussians, various Soviet Slavic populations, and Serbs would be killed by Nazis. About four million persons from Eastern Europe would become forced laborers, often working under life-threatening conditions. Einsatzgruppen would commit mass shootings of educated Poles who might lead any resistance.

Nazi Germany’s Blitzkrieg assault on Poland was typified by the immediate mass murder of civilians. Nazi propaganda had insisted to Germans that Slavs and Jews were subhuman and any normal rules of warfare were not taken into consideration. Tens of thousands of Poles died in this initial assault, through bombing, the burning of villages, and mass executions by both invading Nazis and locals of German ethnicity who aided the invasion. When Warsaw surrendered on September 27, mere weeks after the war’s start, that city alone had lost 20,000 civilians.

On September 17, 1939, the Soviet Union, in accord with the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, attacked Poland from the east. World War II and the subsequent years when Soviet Communists seized and cemented their hold on power featured unimaginable horrors. These years were a grand guignol of “murders of prisoners of war and civilians, mass extermination in camps, show executions, slave labor, forced population displacement and deliberate demolition of cities, villages and settlements. During World War II, Poland suffered the largest human and material losses of all European countries in relation to the total population and national wealth.”

The Nazis and the Soviets were both genocidal powers and both were culturally as well as biologically genocidal. They didn’t just torture and murder people. They looted or destroyed museums, libraries, houses of worship, forests, and animal life. Both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union committed sadistic atrocities. Millions of Polish Catholics were tortured, enslaved, murdered, or imprisoned. Poland’s centuries-old Jewish community, Europe’s largest and the second largest in the world, was all but erased. Nazis transported Jews from throughout occupied Europe to death camps in Poland.

V-E or Victory in Europe Day was finally celebrated on May 8, 1945, when Nazi Germany unconditionally surrendered. While many other victorious Allied nations could enjoy peace, Poland continued fighting against Soviet invaders. The Warsaw Institute reports that “following the end of WWII over 200,000 people were involved in partisan warfare. They fought for independence and against mass terror … The last Polish partisan died in combat against Soviet-led forces as late as 1963 … Warrant officer Antoni Dolega was the last soldier of the Polish Underground State who did not surrender. He stayed in hiding while being continuously chased down by the communists until 1982.”

Nursing student Irena Gut was seventeen years old in September, 1939. Her happy life was torn to shreds. Like thousands of other Poles, she moved from place to place, seeking refuge and a chance to resist Soviet and Nazi invaders. Her father was taken by Nazis. Irena didn’t know this, but they shot him. He was an educated Pole and had to die. Irena’s mother feared that her daughters would be, like other Polish girls, kidnapped by Nazis and forced to become sex slaves in brothels. Irena’s little sisters were eventually, she would later discover, forced to become “slaves in the clay mines.”

Irena, hoping to use her nursing skills, joined soldiers evacuating to the east. The east was no refuge. Irena and others attempted to hide in the forest. Young Irena had never even kissed a boy. Three Red Army soldiers found her, beat her, raped her, and left her unconscious in the snow. During the assault they had kicked her in the face and she was temporarily blinded after she regained consciousness. She went to work for Soviets and again she was subjected to sexual assault. She escaped and went west again. She was arrested by Soviets and interrogated “with threats of Siberia and torture.” But she got free.

Back in Nazi-occupied Poland, Irena attended mass. The church was surrounded by Nazis. This was a “lapanka,” a feature of everyday life in occupied Poland. Nazis would round up a group of random Poles. Some would be killed. Others would be sent to concentration camps. Still others would be conscripted into forced labor. Irena was forced to become a laborer in a Nazi munitions factory. Like most such laborers, she was underfed, and one day she fainted in front of Wehrmacht Major Eduard Ruegemer. Ruegemer complained to the foreman for using sick labor. Irena, recognizing that her life was at risk if she was not of use to the Reich, insisted, in German, on her ability to work.

Irena was young and beautiful, with blonde hair and blue eyes – the Aryan ideal. She was thirty-nine years younger than Ruegemer. She had learned German in high school. Her last name was “Gut,” a German surname. In fact many Poles, including Poles who resisted Nazis, like Maximilian Kolbe, August Emil Fieldorf, and the Ulma family, had German surnames. All these people identified as Polish. They spoke Polish, were born in Poland, and followed Polish cultural patterns.

There were Germans living in Poland, and also Czechoslovakia and the USSR. They spoke German and identified as Germans. Volksdeutsche was a Nazi term for such people. Those who identified with invading Nazis might gain advantages by identifying, not as Poles, but as Volksdeutsche. Appearing, as Irena did, to be Volksdeutsche and yet refusing to so identify and insisting on identifying as Polish could result in punishment. Even so, Irena told the major that she was Polish. “He asked me if I am Volksdeutsche. I say, I am Polish, and I am Catholic. That was my answer. So he said, you are honest, too. You don’t want to grab the opportunity to better yourself” – that is, by identifying as Volksdeutsche.

Irena’s father had made a similar choice. “He was a very proud Pole,” Irena would later say. “So they put a band on him with the letter P, Pole.” The badge to which Irena refers was worn by Poles performing forced labor. The purpose of the badge was to differentiate Poles from Germans. Any social mixing between Germans and Poles would be “Rassenschande,” or “race shame,” punishable by death.

Irena impressed Major Ruegemer, and he had her transferred to food service. Irena began work under a Wehrmacht cook, Schultz, “a short little guy with red cheeks … he showed me his wife and children picture.” Schultz, in spite of everything, made efforts to do the right thing. He could see that Irena was hungry and he set aside food for her.

One day Irena was setting tables. She heard shooting and dogs barking. She looked out the window and witnessed a Gestapo Aktion against Jews. She was horrified. Schultz put his hand over her mouth. “The SS is coming” to the dining room, Schultz said to Irena. “You don’t want them to think you are a Jew-lover.” Irena would later say, “It’s the first time I really know what was happening.”

Irena would witness many horrors, including Nazis tossing Jewish babies and toddlers into the air and shooting them. “I did see a SS man pull a baby from mother’s arm. It was a little infant. The baby was crying. And he just took the baby and threw it head to the ground.” Irena also witnessed a mass execution of Jews. “Behind the town was a dug shallow grave. They use machine gun. The lucky ones, they were dead. Because the earth was quivering with the breath of those that were buried alive. I never forget.”

Irena began to smuggle food into the Jewish ghetto, and she found other ways to resist. “I was cleaning the Major’s office. And on his desk I noticed stack of permits with a stamp from the Gestapo for the Jewish.” The stamp permitted some movement for the Jewish holder. “Well, I did have the idea when I was cleaning some of these I just put in my pocket.”

On one occasion, Irena smuggled a Jew out of the ghetto just after an Aktion. “I have the cart and I went. And there was a Gestapo standing right in this. Was just after Aktion … I realize now that I am a pretty young girl, speak German, with blonde and blue eyed, so I start playing the role.”

The Jewish woman Irena had arrived to smuggle out of the ghetto refused to leave. Irena insisted. “Your parents get killed there. You have to survive. Somebody has to tell what happened.”

To get food for Jews, “When I was serving dinner to the German officers and secretaries, I pleaded with them that I have a big family. I was like a Volksdeutsche, you know? I have family and they are hungry. And I have nephews, and nieces. And please if you don’t use your rationing tickets, would you please give it to me?”

In her prayers, Irena challenged God. How could he allow the murder of innocents? God, she believed, responded, telling her that he was God, that evil existed, that he was with her, and that he would help her. In her future efforts, she believed that God never asked her to do what she could not do, only to do what she could do, what was right in front of her.

Irena was placed in charge of Jewish laundry workers. She hid food in laundry baskets for them to find. She told Schultz that she needed extra blankets for herself. She suspected that Schultz knew she actually wanted them for the Jewish laborers, but he just gave her the blankets and said nothing more. Irena’s gestures earned the Jews’ trust.

Eventually Irena would become the cook and housekeeper for Ruegemer at his villa. Realizing what fate the Nazis had in store for Jews, she decided to hide twelve Jewish laundry workers there. One of her charges knew that the villa had been constructed by a Jewish architect, and assumed that there would be a hiding place. They found that hiding place – through a hidden passageway and under the gazebo.

Polish non-Jews who helped Jews risked death to their entire families and possibly neighbors as well. This Nazi edict was well publicized. One day Irena and other Poles were forced to watch as Nazis hanged a Polish family, including women and children, as well as the Jews this family had been hiding. “There is no way I can tell you – the little children screaming. Then the fighting for breath.” Irena was distraught. Irena had previously heard from an eye witness a report of Nazis massacring multiple random Poles in reprisal for one Polish resister damaging a Nazi’s car. Irena knew that by helping Jews she was risking her own life and the lives of all around her.

After witnessing the hanging, Irena returned to the major’s villa so distraught that she forgot to lock the front door. Some Jews were upstairs. The major entered next, and encountered the Jews. He would keep Irena’s secret, he promised, if she would have sex with him. She saw no way to refuse. Irena felt, as she put it, “very, very bad.” Irena did not tell her Jewish friends what she was doing for them.

Irena confessed to a young priest in Poland. That priest told her she had to stop all sexual contact with the major, even if that meant that Irena and the Jews would all be killed. “He didn’t understand,” she would say. “He didn’t give me absolution.” Irena later confessed to a priest in the U.S. This priest said, “My child, you were very young. There is no guilt in you because you did what you did to save others.” His words, she would say, “helped me to this day.”

As the Soviets advanced, Irena smuggled her Jewish charges to the forest, and she herself joined the Polish partisans there. She fell in love with a freedom fighter, the “very handsome” Janek, who was quickly killed. “And so I become widow before I become bride. I was so upset.”

When the war officially ended, Irena moved west to Krakow. She sought out the Jews she had rescued, and found some, but they knew she was not safe and that her presence put them at risk. The brother of someone she rescued was a Soviet soldier.

Invading Soviet Communists persecuted Poles, like Irena, who had resisted Nazis. “Soldiers of the AK are a hostile element which must be removed without mercy,” said Polish Communist leader Wladyslaw Gomulka. Roman Zambrowski, another Communist, said that the Home Army had to be “exterminated.”

Beginning as early as August, 1944, Soviet Communists arrested, disarmed, and interned 25,000 Polish soldiers, including 300 Home Army officers (Black Book of Communism: Poland the “Enemy Nation.”) “Smersh had its own jails, the NKVD had its own camps … for detained Poles. Between 1944–1946 various Soviet units held around 47,000 people, with no less than 25 per cent of Polish underground soldiers, and half of civilians detained being Polish citizens. In the spring of 1945 about 15,000 Silesian miners were sent to the mines in Donetsk area in USSR.” In short, the end of the war was not a time of peace, free of oppression, in Soviet-Communist-occupied Poland. (A Handbook of the Communist Security Apparatus in East Central Europe.)

Polish anti-Nazi resisters were tortured, murdered, and buried in unmarked graves by Soviet Communists in the post-war period. Others were sent to gulags. Those so victimized included profoundly heroic anti-Nazi resistance fighters like Witold Pilecki, who had volunteered to be smuggled into Auschwitz in order to lead a resistance there, and August Emil Fieldorf, who ordered the successful assassination of SS and Police Leader Franz Kutschera.

The Soviets arrested Irena and interrogated her for days, but she was very thin, and was able to squeeze through widely-spaced bars and escape. Irena’s Jewish friends dyed her hair black and gave her false papers identifying her as Jewish. She was smuggled into a refugee camp in Germany, where she faced a new enemy: diphtheria. After three years in that camp, William Opdyke, a United Nations employee, helped Irena Gut come to America.

Irena Gut found factory work her second day in the United States. “And I was alone, without money, family, marketable skills, not one word of English. But one thing I did have. I was free. And America did not owe me anything. I owed America. She adopted me. So second day in United States, I find myself working at garment center, vestment foundation. And I worked there for five years.” In 1956, by chance, she ran into William Opdyke again. Six weeks later, they married.

Mrs. Opdyke became a loving wife and mother. She did not share her wartime activity. “I put the biggest sign on my memory. Do not disturb!” In the 1970s, she learned of Holocaust denial, and she decided she would speak out. She especially valued speaking to young people. “I have a children that told me, Mrs. Opdyke, please, please forgive me. I say, for what? I am German. And I am so ashamed. I hug him. I say, honey, you’re not guilty. You were not born.”

Movies based on real people often add drama to make the real person’s story more interesting. Irena’s Vow has to make Irena Gut’s life less complicated, less overwhelming, in order to fit its two-hour runtime. Irena’s Vow compresses and streamlines Irena Gut’s saga. Sophie Nelisse, a twenty-four-year old French Canadian, won her first acting award when she was eleven, for the 2011 film, Monsieur Lazhar. Nelisse is superb as Irena Gut. Nelisse exhibits the beauty of a classic Greek statue. Jeannie Opdyke Smith, Irena’s daughter, says that she finds Nelisse’s depiction of her mother to be quite convincing.

Dougray Scott brings a combination of stoicism and pathos to his depiction of an elderly Wehrmacht officer experiencing forbidden lust for the Untermensch who has outwitted him.

Veteran Polish actor Andrzej Seweryn, who also did creepily effective work as a Nazi in Schindler’s List is touching as Schultz. In the film, Seweryn’s Schultz gives Irena a speech. In times like these, Schultz tells Irena, don’t look to the left. Don’t look to the right. Just look at your feet, and do the next thing. “Worry about you. Take care of you. Know only what you need to know.” Irena is horrified by Nazi atrocities. Schultz insists, “Don’t tell me. I don’t want to know. Just serve desert.” Of course she will be serving dessert to Nazis she just watched commit atrocities. “Sometimes survival depends on serving dessert,” says Schultz. Schultz’s advice informs the audience of how some survived Nazism. Of course Irena violates Schultz’s advice dramatically.

Maciej Nawrocki, a young Polish actor, is SS-Untersturmführer Richard Rokita. Nawrocki knows how to play a purely evil character and his scenes are blood chilling. Reviews tend to refer, obliquely, to one particular scene. I will eschew the circumlocutions used by others. Rokita pulls a baby from the mother’s arms and murders that baby, and then murders the mother as well. This scene plays out as the real Irena Gut herself described witnessing it and others like it. It’s a very hard scene to watch but it is also, one must say, masterfully shot and performed.

In another scene, equally as horrifying but much colder, Rokita explicates how genocide works, how the Nazis groomed Jews and bystanders. Nazis began small. “No one is going to revolt over a sign,” like “No Jews allowed.” But of course that sign is just the first step. “The circle constricts a little more. They get used to obeying. To being pliable. We use them up till there is nothing left.”

The real Rokita was a monstrously evil man. A survivor described one of his creepier traits; his soft-spokenness and his appeals for approval. “He always seemed to need approval from the prisoners for his every act … Rokita would often kill an inmate for some minor infraction—or no reason at all. And whenever he did he would actually try to persuade the rest of us that his actions had been for our own good. ‘The camp is less crowded now; there is more for all of you to eat,’ he would say to us almost pleadingly.”

Young Polish actors play the Jews Irena rescues. They are all given names and introductions. There is a doctor, a chemist, a nurse, a lawyer, an artist, a teacher. The scene that introduces them, slowly and carefully, one by one, reminds us that each victim of Nazism was a person just like us who had a name, a life, loves, and dreams.

Irena’s Vow moved me deeply. I was punching myself and mouthing imprecations at the screen. I felt as if I were with Irena, experiencing events with her. I don’t know if I found it so moving because Irena was so easy for me to identify with. I’ve never before seen a World War II movie where a female character was carrying the weight of the world on her shoulders in an act of heroism.

Why did Irena’s Vow, a quality film about an extraordinary, lovable, beautiful young heroine receive only a two-day theatrical release in the US? Why has it received so little publicity? I honestly have no idea. I can speculate, but my speculation is just that, guesses from someone who is not at all in the know.

1) Holocaust fatigue. Comments under the film’s trailer on YouTube express Holocaust fatigue. These posts say, paraphrase, “Oh, not another Holocaust movie. They are trying for an Academy Award because Holocaust movies are awards bait. We should make movies about other, lesser known atrocities.”

Here’s one such comment: “Another eternal reminder of Js…suffering.  My people over 100 million Indigenous and Mexicans perished by the cruel hand of the Red, White, and Blue and their land stolen and US still not charged nor punished for their crimes.  No movies, no support to our suffering, but these so-called survivors get all the attention.”

2) Antisemitism. Some of the YouTube comments that express Holocaust fatigue also express overt antisemitism. An example: “Forget that! The Jewish mafia is popping out movies of the Holocaust frequently now. Trying to make people feel sorry for them. These arrogant sobs don’t realize that people will look at what their doing to Palestinians is exactly what was done to them.”

3) Anti-Polish sentiment. Some, not all Jews and non-Jews cling to what I have called the Bieganski, Brute Polak stereotype. See here. In this stereotype, it is Polish Catholic peasants, not modern, educated, neo-Pagan Nazis who are responsible for the Holocaust. It is true that some Poles responded to occupation by profiting from Jewish suffering. There is a “szmalcownik,” or blackmailer, depicted in Irena’s Vow. These Poles sniffed out Jews in hiding and blackmailed them or their rescuers. Or, they handed Jews over to Nazis and received rewards. It is also true that some Poles committed atrocities against or just petty cruelties to Jews not for profit, but out of hatred or perversion. In the Bieganski stereotype, evil Poles express a true, essential Polish character. Polish rescuers are anomalies and discussing them undermines the Bieganski narrative – so it’s better not to discuss good Poles at all.

In the online USC Shoah Foundation interview of Irena Gut Opdyke, the interviewer, Renee Firestone, is audible, but Irena’s portion is all but inaudible. Irena tells a mind boggling story of personal suffering and outstanding courage and Ms. Firestone ignores all of that and focuses relentlessly on an assumed Polish antisemitism. Weren’t your parents, your schools, your church, your entire country, all antisemitic, Firestone hammers away at Irena. Only towards the end of the interview does Irena express some irk. She says that she raises funds for Israel and in this work people comment to her about “Polish concentration camps” and she corrects them. She says she has met Jews who were rescued by Poles. She asks them if they have submitted their account to Yad Vashem to include these helpers among the righteous, and they say no. This frustrates her.

4) Polish-American inaction. I learned of Irena’s Vow only through coming attractions in theaters where I had gone to see other movies. I am in touch with many Polish-Americans on Facebook and not a single one mentioned this film to me. In my experience, Polish-Americas tend to focus on cuisine. They post many posts about pierogies. Not so much about recent cultural products.

5) Goodness is boring. Audiences pay to see sex and violence and plots driven by action heroes. Irena’s Vow focuses on quiet, subtle ruses that advance human life: a hard sell.

6) Abortion. As Irena Gut Opdyke describes in her own memoirs, one of her charges became pregnant. The other Jews in hiding gave Irena a shopping list for the material necessary to perform an abortion. Irena debated with her friends. She said that she did not want to give Hitler another Jewish baby’s death. The abortion was never performed, and Roman Haller was born. He appeared at the premier of Irena’s Vow in Toronto to praise it enthusiastically. Any film that appears to regard abortion as wrong faces an uphill climb.

Danusha Goska is the author of God Through Binoculars: A Hitchhiker at a Monastery.