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In Janówka, about three hundred Jewish people escaped. Some of them were from our plant, and some were from other German plants. …
There was a priest in Janówka. He knew about the Jews’ escape—many of the Polish people knew about it. Can you imagine living underground as the Jews were forced to do when the winter came? Many people brought food and other things—not right to the forest, but to the edge—from the village. The priest could not say directly “help the Jews,” but he would say in church, “not one of you should take the blood of your brother.” …
During the next couple of weeks there were posters on every street corner saying, “This is a Jew-free town, and if any one should help an escaped Jew, the sentence is death.”
A more detailed account appeared in her memoir (Irene Gut Opdyke with Jennifer Armstrong), In My Hands: Memories of a Holocaust Rescuer (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999), at pages 146–51. Irene Opdyke describes her encounter with the village priest after having smuggled some Jews from Tarnopol, where she worked in a German officers’ dining room, to the forest near Janówka.
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