A play about Irena Gut, a Polish woman who saved a group of Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland, has been produced by The Directors Company at the off-Broadway Baruch Performing Arts Center. Written by Dan Gordon and directed by Michael Parva, Irena’s Vow focuses on the extraordinary life of Irena Gut.
Michal Kubicki reports
It was indeed an extraordinary life. Irena Gut was 17 when World War Two broke out. Beaten and raped by a group of Soviet soldiers, she went through many ordeals. Assigned as a housekeeper to a Nazi officer, she hid twelve Jews in the basement of his villa. The man agreed to remain silent on the condition that she become his lover. She lost both of her parents and a fiancee during the war. She left Poland for the United States in 1949 thanks to assistance offered by UN delegate in Poland William Opdyke. Some years later she met Opdyke unexpectedly in New York. They fell in love and married.
Irena Gut decided to tell her story only after she saw a press article denying the Holocaust. Her book In My Hands: Memories of a Holocaust Rescuer, published in 1999, became a bestseller. The play Irena’s Vow by Dan Gordon has been hailed as a major success. On the line from New York, Michael Parva who directed the production told me about the message he wanted to get across to the audience: ‘... to be able to communicate to the audience her courageous story. She was such an amazing young lady and amazing as she was, she was a regular person who did the right things. Her courage and the choices that she made as a young woman were so admirable. I was hoping we’ll be able to communicate that in our production and I’m hoping that we did that. ‘
The production won both critical acclaim and a very warm response from the audience. For Michael Parva the story of Irena Gut is an universal story: ‘because it talk about individual choice and as you watch her story unfold I think a question that comes in the audience is what would I have done if I were put in the circumstances that she was put into, and that’s a wonderful question for every individual to reflect on. This is what this production help bring out in a very personal way. Live theatre can do that.’
Focusing as it does on Irena Gut’s war-time experiences, the play is relevant in the present-day context. ‘Right now we need to celebrate some good in the world. Irena embodies that. These are difficult times in the world right now and people want to find encouragement from our history where we find people who were courageous and made good choices for humanity,’ said Michael Parva, the director of Irena’s Vow, currently running at the off-Broadway Baruch Performing Arts Center.
In 1982 Irena Gut received the Righteous Among the Nations medal from the Yad Vashem Institute in Jerusalem. During her first visit to Poland, in 1984, she was reunited with her sisters. She died in California five years ago.