Dennis Prager tells a story of a woman in Nazi-occupied Poland that raises some serious moral questions. The story has been made into a play that's currently on Broadway entitled Irena's Vow:
Playwright Dan Gordon and director Michael Parva have made goodness riveting in the new Broadway play, "Irena's Vow." The Irena of the title is Irena 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.
Here's the question this story compels us to ponder: Is what Irena did wrong or right? Do you, like Prager, see her adultery as heroic and deeply good or do you see it as deeply wrong and sinful? Or neither? Is your answer one you could explain to someone else or is it just an intuition?
RLC
