Irene Opdyke ( 5 May 1922, Kozienice, Poland – 17 May 2003) was a Polish nurse who gained recognition for aiding Jews persecuted by the Nazis during World War II and for saving twelve Jews.
She was born Irene Gut on May 5 1922, one of five girls, into a Catholic family in a small village in eastern Poland. The family moved from Kozienice to Chelm and then to Radom where she enrolled as a nursing student.
In 1939, when the German army invaded Poland, Irene Gut volunteered to join a Polish army unit and went with it into hiding in the Ukrainian forest. But she was taken prisoner by Russian soldiers who raped her and left her in the snow to die. She survived, escaped and was briefly reunited with her parents and her four younger sisters at Radom in Nazi-occupied Poland.
In Nazi-occupied Poland Irene Gut, as she…
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