In My Hands Memories of a Holocaust Rescuer
by Jennifer Armstrong
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Book Summary Information
Author: Jennifer ArmstrongEdition: Turtleback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2002-02
ISBN: 060620721X
Publisher: Demco Media
Summary of In My Hands Memories of a Holocaust Rescuer
In My Hands began as one non-Jew?s challenge to any who would deny the Holocaust. Much like The Diary of Anne Frank, it has become a profound document of an individual?s heroism in the face of the greatest evil mankind has known.In the fall of 1939 the Nazis invaded Irene Gut?s beloved Poland, ending her training as a nurse and thrusting the sixteen-year-old Catholic girl into a world of degradation that somehow gave her the strength to accomplish what amounted to miracles. Forced into the service of the German army, young Irene was able, due in part to her Aryan good looks, to use her position as a servant in an officers? club to steal food and supplies (and even information overheard at the officers? tables) for the Jews in the ghetto. She smuggled Jews out of the work camps, ultimately hiding a dozen people in the home of a Nazi major for whom she was housekeeper.
An important addition to the literature of human survival and heroism, In My Hands is further proof of why, in spite of everything, we must believe in the goodness of people.
When World War II began, Irene Gutowna was a 17-year-old Polish nursing student. Six years later, she writes in this inspiring memoir, "I felt a million years old." In the intervening time she was separated from her family, raped by Russian soldiers, and forced to work in a hotel serving German officers. Sickened by the suffering inflicted on the local Jews, Irene began leaving food under the walls of the ghetto. Soon she was scheming to protect the Jewish workers she supervised at the hotel, and then hiding them in the lavish villa where she served as housekeeper to a German major. When he discovered them in the house, Gutowna became his mistress to protect her friends--later escaping him to join the Polish partisans during the Germans' retreat. The author presents her extraordinary heroism as the inevitable result of small steps taken over time, but her readers will not agree as they consume this thrilling adventure story, which also happens to be a drama of moral choice and courage. Although adults will find Irene's tale moving, it is appropriately published as a young adult book. Her experiences while still in her teens remind adolescents everywhere that their actions count, that the power to make a difference is in their hands. --Wendy Smith
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