A tale with universal applications

In My Hands; Memories of a Holocaust Rescuer; Irene Gut Opdyke with Jennifer Armstrong; Published by Corgi, 2001; 284 pp, $16.38;

JAKARTA (JP): Courage? What is it? It seems to take two broad forms, physical and moral.

Most people, I imagine, find it easier, in a way, to imagine themselves performing acts of the former, though, surely, few of us want to boast about it.

In certain situations the two come together. The record of resistance to political and military dictatorships around the world is ample proof of that. The morally courageous know the physical risks that they are taking.

If, as the Polish writer Stanislaus Lec said, "The dispensing of injustice is always in the right hands" then, probably, the morally courageous will always be under physical threat.

The record of Resistance to the ferocious oppression of the Nazis is, of course, full of examples of people who found ways, small and large, to face up to evil. And among these were the immeasurably brave people who tried to save Jews. Not the mass of Jews--the calculus was wildly tipped against them--but individuals and small groups, where they could, when they could.

Raoul Wallenberg, Swedish diplomat who saved the lives of many Hungarian Jews in the last weeks of the war and almost certainly disappeared into the maw of the Soviet Gulag; Aristides de Sousa Mendes, diplomat-servant of Salazar's far-right Portuguese dictatorship; Sugihara, the Japanese attache in a small Lithuanian town who issued many thousands of hand-written safe conduct passes so local Jews could -- and this almost beggars belief -- escape across the Soviet Union when both Japan and Nazi Germany were Stalin's allies; Oscar Schindler.

Irene Gut was an ordinary Catholic Pole, a teenage girl from Radom, where there was a sizable Jewish population, who belongs to this small band of people who risked much for the European Jews -- we will never know how small or great it really was, so cruel was the Nazi dictatorship. This is the remarkable story of a fine young woman who suffered the Stalinist banalities as the Soviets compromised with Hitler and then saw much of the force of the latter's evil. That she could hide Jews who would survive right under the feet of her Nazi tormentors is a truly uplifting tale.

She watched the ghettoing of the Jews in Radom and decided she must do something, and even when under the known threat of summary execution, would leave food for them on the perimeter of the ghetto. And then in a situation of awesome difficulty proceeded to scale much greater heights of moral courage.

A story with universal applications. Highly recommended.

--David Jardine