Irene Gut Opdyke, who has died in California aged 81, saved Jews during the Holocaust by becoming the mistress of Major Eduard Rugemer, a 70-year-old German officer.
In Nazi-occupied Poland Irene Gut, as she then was, hid 12 Jews, including a pregnant woman, in the basement of the villa where she was employed as a housekeeper. When Rugemer was away, the Jews would sneak upstairs and help Irene Gut with the housework. But on one occasion, the German officer returned home early. "He got white and shaky," Irene Gut Opdyke later remembered, and he ran to phone the head of the Gestapo. She chased the major, cried and pleaded and then agreed to become his mistress in exchange for letting the Jews remain in the basement.
A good Catholic girl, Irene Gut was upset at becoming a mistress and went to confess to a country priest. "I was expecting him to say 'Well, you had no choice, a human life is more important'," she recalled years later, "but instead he told me that I had to turn everyone out, that my mortal soul is more important than anything else. Well, I could not agree with this . . . "
Some four decades later, Irene Gut Opdyke received international recognition for her bravery when the Israel Holocaust Commission named her one of the "Righteous Among the Nations" - a title given to those who risked their lives by saving Jews during the Holocaust - and she was presented with the Israel Medal of Honour, the country's highest tribute, in a ceremony at Jerusalem's Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial.
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.
But while praying at a local church, she was arrested in a lapanka, a round-up of Polish citizens, loaded in a truck with other prisoners and sent to work in a munitions factory where she fell ill.
Rugemer felt pity for her and gave her a position in the kitchen of a hotel for Nazis. It was at the hotel, which was located next to the Jewish ghetto in Radom, that Irene Gut observed the treatment of the Jews by the Nazis. She also began helping the Jews by putting leftovers in boxes and leaving them just inside the ghetto fence. She knew she was risking her life.
In April 1942, Irene Gut witnessed a gruesome event which would transform her. Walking down the street, she saw a Nazi officer tossing an infant into the air like a clay pigeon and shooting him. This shocked her to the core. "To see children murdered! And I was raised in the Catholic faith . . . I turned against my Lord, against God. I asked God: help me to help. I was ready to give my life to be able to help."
It was soon after this event that she was made a housekeeper at Rugemer's villa, where she successfully hid her 12 Jews. In addition to looking after them, Irene Gut - aided by an old priest and another Catholic girl and using a horse and buggy - smuggled others to the nearby forest to escape.
It was deeply upsetting for her to leave the Jews on their own in the forest. "I felt like the wicked woman in a children's story," she said, "abandoning them to the wolves." But she always returned to bring food and blankets, obtained by raiding the German Warenhaus.
In early 1944, Irene Gut herself and her Jewish friends left the villa and fled to the forest where they stayed until the Russians gained control of Poland.
After the war, and by then helped by the Jews ("it was their turn to help me"), she was smuggled away from the Russians into Germany and from there, in 1948, emigrated to the United States, where she would remain until her death on Saturday.
A tiny (she was 4ft 11in), soft-spoken, white-haired lady with blue eyes and usually clad in a red dress, Irene Gut Opdyke spent the last 30 years of her life travelling the country to tell her story to American schoolchildren. "I wanted to teach them to reach out to each other regardless of nationality, religion, colour or creed. We belong to one family, and I tell them to learn to love each other, help each other."
In 1997, she was taken to Israel to meet the Jews she had helped during the war. Two years later, her book In My Hands: Memories of a Holocaust Rescuer was published and sold over a million copies; a play based on the book and a movie are expected to start production soon. The Vatican has given her a special commendation and her story is part of a permanent exhibit in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC.
She met her husband William Opdyke after the war when, as a worker for the United Nations, he had interviewed her at a camp for displaced persons. Some years later, they ran into each other again in New York City and married on November 14 1956.
But disappointed with the attitude of the Catholic Church during the war, the couple decided to get married at a Presbyterian church. They later lived in Yorba Linda in California where Irene Gut Opdyke ran her own business.
Irene Gut Opdyke is survived by her daughter Jeannie Smith.
