How a German officer's mistress risked everything to save 12 lives
In short: During the Nazi occupation of Poland, Irene Gut faced a harrowing choice. After witnessing a soldier kill an infant, she resolved to fight evil with good. Working in a hotel kitchen, she began a dangerous game of smuggling food and hiding people in a cellar to ensure their survival.
Irene Gut, a Polish nurse, lived through the horrors of the Nazi-Soviet invasion of 1939. While working in a hotel kitchen due to her fluency in German, she witnessed a German soldier kill an infant by throwing it head-first onto the ground. This trauma transformed her; she decided that despite the risk, she would use her position to help the persecuted Jews in the Tarnopol Ghetto.
Gut's courage extended to her private life. She hid 12 Jews in the cellar of a villa requisitioned by Wehrmacht Major Eduard Rügemer. When Rügemer discovered the hidden individuals, he made a harrowing demand: he would keep their secret only if Gut became his mistress. She accepted the condition to keep the 12 people alive, who would emerge from the cellar to clean the house when the Major was absent.
The complexity of these wartime relationships surfaced decades later. After the war, Rügemer was rejected by his own wife and children in Nuremberg for his role in saving Jews. In a remarkable turn of events, the Hallers—survivors whom Gut had helped by convincing them to carry a pregnancy to term while in hiding—eventually took Rügemer into their Munich home. One of those survivors, Roman Haller, went on to serve as the director of the German office of the Claims Conference.
Gut's legacy was officially recognized by Yad Vashem. In 1982, she was honored as a Polish Righteous Among the Nations, and in 2012, she received the same distinction as a German Righteous Among the Nations.
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Sources
- Summary by Intellect · source: Irene Gut Opdyke
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