In My Hands

By Irene Gut Opdyke, Jennifer Armstrong,

Book cover of In My Hands: Memories of a Holocaust Rescuer

Book description

IRENE GUT WAS just 17 in 1939, when the Germans and Russians devoured her native Poland. Just a girl, really. But a girl who saw evil and chose to defy it.

“No matter how many Holocaust stories one has read, this one is a must, for its impact is so…

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Why read it?

1 author picked In My Hands as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

This is the extraordinary memoir of Irene, a young Catholic woman from Poland who was forced to work for the Russians and the Nazis. Her compassion began as a young child when she rescued and healed injured wild animals.  She later trained as a nurse. What began as small, very risky acts to smuggle food to Jews in the Polish ghetto, soon turned into much more perilous endeavors. She ultimately singlehandedly hid and fed 12 Jews in the basement of a Nazi Major’s home while she was caring for him. Irene served as a resistance fighter and a partisan who hid in…

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Tap Dancing on Everest, part coming-of-age memoir, part true-survival adventure story, is about a young medical student, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor raised in N.Y.C., who battles self-doubt to serve as the doctor—and only woman—on a remote Everest climb in Tibet.

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