Irena Gut Opdyke

Irena Gut is the main figure and narrator of this story. In the book, she was a young Polish woman who worked to help the Jews during World War II. She directly saved 13 Jews from death in the Nazi concentration camps as she harbored them inside the house where she lived. Indirectly, Irena may have saved many more through her work of warning these people of coming raids and executions by the Germans. She additionally devoted herself to taking food and supplies to Jews hidden in the woods near the town of Ternopol where she was working at the German headquarters.

Irena began her activities in the war when she volunteered to travel as a nurse with the men of the Polish army when they retreated from Radom, the city where she had been studying to be a nurse. When the country of Poland was...