Hero or Sinner?

Radio host Dennis Prager once told a story of a woman in Nazi-occupied Poland that raised some interesting moral questions. The story was made into a Broadway play entitled Irene's Vow.

Prager said this about the play:

Playwright Dan Gordon and director Michael Parva have made goodness riveting in the new Broadway play, "Irene's Vow." The Irene of the title is Irene Gut Opdyke, who, at the time of the play's World War II's setting, was a pretty 19-year-old blond Polish Roman Catholic to whom fate (she would say God) gave the opportunity to save 12 Jews in, of all places, the home of the highest-ranking German officer in a Polish city.

Ultimately discovered by the Nazi officer, she was offered the choice of becoming the elderly Nazi's mistress or the Jews all being sent to death camps.

As it happens, I interviewed Opdyke on my radio show 20 years ago and again 12 years later, and she revealed to me how conflicted she was about what she consented to do not only because she became what fellow Poles derided as a "Nazi whore" but because as a deeply religious Catholic she was sure she was committing a grave sin by regularly sleeping with a man to whom she was not married and worse, indeed a married man, which likely rendered her sin of adultery a mortal sin.

What she did therefore, was not only heroic because she had to overcome daily fear of being caught and put to death, but because she also had to overcome a daily fear of committing a mortal sin before God.

During the German occupation, Irene Gut was hired by Wehrmacht Major Eduard Rügemer to work in a kitchen of a hotel that frequently served Nazi officials. Inspired by her Christian faith, she secretly took food from the hotel and delivered it to people in the Jewish ghetto.

She also smuggled Jews out of the ghetto into the surrounding forest and delivered food to them there. This, at a time when Poles were being shot just for giving bread to Jews.

Meanwhile, Rügemer asked her to work as a housekeeper in his requisitioned villa.

Once she had become the officer's housekeeper she had, unbeknownst to him, hidden a dozen Jews in his basement. During the day while he was away from the house tending to his duties, she would go out to find food and medicine for the Jews, and they would do the cleaning and other tasks that Irena was supposed to do.

Before the Major returned in the evening they would return to the basement. This went on for some time until one day Rügemer came home early and discovered what was happening. He was about to report the Jews to the SS but Irene pleaded with him not to. He then confronted her with the terrible choice mentioned above. You can read more about Irene here.

Here are a couple of questions this story compels us to ponder: Is what Irene did in agreeing to be the Major's mistress wrong or right? Do you, like Prager, see her adultery as heroic and deeply good or do you see it as wrong and sinful? Or neither? Is your answer one you could explain to someone else or is it an intuition that you have?