49 pages • 1 hour read
In My Hands: Memories of a Holocaust Rescuer
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Themes
Religion as Both Disappointment and Support
Throughout the events of In My Hands, both Irena and other characters look to religion to find strength against the horrors of war. At times, Irena feels abandoned by a God who’s let such terrible things happen, and she is let down by the trappings of organized religion, but ultimately her faith that God has a purpose for her carries her through.
As a child, Irena has faith that God will always protect her beloved Poland, as evidenced by her awe for the Black Madonna icon. However, war quickly decimates Poland, and Irena can no longer find the same comfort in religious rites. On one visit to church she says, “I stood, and kneeled, and sat, and mumbled my responses by rote, but the mass did not give me the solace I craved” (89). As the war escalates, she sees such tragedy that she believes God has “been deaf” to many in need (158). More disappointment comes when she seeks absolution for becoming Rügemer’s mistress in order to save lives, and the priest will not grant it.
Most of Irena’s disappointments come from elements of organized religion—mass, confession, a specific priest—and ultimately, her faith in a more abstract God prevails. Interestingly, Irena receives support for her faith from her Jewish friends, who insist that “God has heard us” (158). Unlike the Germans, who condemn the Jews for their differences in religious beliefs, Irena connects with her friends over their shared reliance on God. Father Joseph also urges Christians to help the Jews, for failing to do so would mean “stain[ing] our hands with the blood of innocents” (147). Both Father Joseph and Father Tadeusz, the latter of whom comforts Irena after her fiancé’s death, provide positive counterparts to the priest who disappoints Irena.
At the end of the memoir, Irena concludes that God has given her the “treasure” of “free will” (265) that allowed her to save lives. Irena draws great strength from God’s support, but in the end, she herself takes action to do good in the world, rather than relying on God to act as savior.
Witnessing and Processing the Evils of War
Throughout In My Hands, Irena must describe human acts so evil that she finds it difficult to speak them aloud. The way Irena perceives and describes the inhumanity of war shifts throughout the memoir, both reflecting her own maturation throughout the war and helping to guide readers through her story.
In the first part of the book, great evil and violence is often viewed through a lens of disbelief and detachment, as though Irena is trying to protect herself. When Poland is first attacked, Irena says “this could not be me” (21) standing amid exploding bombs. As she witnesses the brutality of German soldiers toward the Jews, she repeats, “This cannot be real” (102). And when Irena herself is violently raped, she detaches herself from the scene by imagining herself as a bird, gazing up at the starry sky and wishing she could fly away.
Describing perhaps the most violent and inhumane image of the story, the murder of an innocent Jewish baby, Irena again uses bird imagery to portray the inconceivable. Irena says that at the time, “it was not possible to say with words what we had witnessed” (118). By describing the baby as a bird, Irena finds a way to say what she believes is impossible to speak plainly.
However, as the memoir continues, Irena discovers she must face evil head-on, clearly and plainly defined, in order to fight against it. When she learns that Hitler plans to exterminate first the Jews and then the remaining Poles, she says, “In my heart, perhaps I had known it all along, but always I had looked away before I saw the whole truth” (153). Now, facing the truth, she acts in time to save her Jewish friends.
As the war ends, Irena and her fellow survivors must find a way to deal with having seen “the worst thing man can do” (118). Irena says that at the end of the war, the survivors “flew from” the evil they had seen, “and did not wish to see it, and closed our mouths to keep our griefs in” (265). However, as the years pass, Irena finds a way to live with what she’s seen by shifting her perception of horror. When the image of the dying baby comes to her unbidden, she transforms it in her mind to a vision of a bird escaping, flying free.
Even as she takes charge of her own perception, Irena refuses to forget or to keep quiet about the inhumanity she’s witnessed. With the war far behind her, she will no longer close her mouth and “keep our griefs in” (265). Instead, she ends the memoir by asserting “This is my will: to do right; to tell you; and to remember” (265).
The Power of Human Decency
Addressing the theme of great evil discussed above, Irena says that “The war was a series of choices made by many people. Some of those choices were as wicked and shameful to humanity as anything in history” (265). However, she adds that “some of us made other choices” (265), and it is these other choices—the choices to act against evil and do what is right for humanity, even amid great danger—that shine through as the central hope of the memoir. Irena herself progresses from small acts of kindness to becoming a hero, a saver of lives, and many other characters do what they can to preserve humanity.
Irena frames her own heroism not as some lofty achievement, but as something she simply had to do to preserve her own decency and humanity. She says, “I did not ask myself, Should I do this? But, How will I do this? Every step of my childhood had brought me to this crossroad; I must take the right path, or I would no longer be myself” (142). Irena simply cannot live with herself if she does nothing to stop the great evil taking place before her eyes. In addition, while Irena’s heroism extends to great acts like hiding and transporting Jews right under German eyes, she emphasizes that “one’s first steps are always small” (143), and something as minor as hiding food under a fence can lead to something as great as saving lives.
Throughout the memoir, Irena witnesses many others taking small steps similar to hers: Herr Schulz gives Irena extra food, supplies, and time off, knowing she is using these privileges to help the Jews; Father Joseph urges his parishioners to aid the Jews hiding in the nearby forest; Zygmunt Pasiewski also helps the Jews in the forest, and takes two Jewish women into his home. Even Major Rügemer allows Irena to save lives by keeping her secret after he discovers the Jews hiding in his basement. Thanks to examples like these, Irena concludes that “in spite of all the dreadful things I had witnessed, I had still met good, brave people during this terrible war” (227). Rather than extreme acts of heroism, it is these small acts of compassion and bravery that allow Irena to maintain her faith in humanity.
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