49 pages • 1 hour read
Irene Gut Opdyke, Jennifer ArmstrongIn My Hands: Memories of a Holocaust Rescuer
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 1992A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Birds
Birds become a central symbol from the first chapter of the memoir, when Irena and her sisters nurse a wounded stork back to health, and bird imagery maintains an important role until the final page of the book. Most importantly, Irena sees herself as a bird throughout the memoir, starting off as “a fledgling pushed from its nest,” losing her innocent girlhood too early in the midst of war. By the end of the memoir she has “been forced to learn how to fly” (265).
When she is raped by Russian soldiers early on in the memoir, Irena imagines she’s a bird “trying to fly off” (34), but at this point she is unable to fly free and escape. She continues to see herself as a trapped bird throughout the early years of the war; when threatened by German soldiers, she says “my heart thrashed like a netted bird” (70). However, as Irena becomes bolder and more courageous in her efforts to save her friends, she comes ever closer to freeing herself from the net of war—thus Part Two of the book is titled “Finding Wings.” When the war ends, and she is reunited with the people she’s saved, Irena feels like “a mother hen who finally has all her chicks together again” (251).
The imagery of birds comes full circle when, imprisoned by the Russians at the end of the memoir, Irena imagines herself as Bociek, the stork she rescued as a young girl. Irena no longer sees herself as a weak fledgling trapped in a net, but as a great bird that is “formidable” even when wounded, “his shiny, black eyes blinking at us in defiance” (253). Like Bociek, Irena uses her defiance to escape and fly away from the Russians—finally, with the war over, she has learned how to fly.
In addition to representing Irena’s journey throughout the memoir, birds also allow the author to describe horrors too great to convey in plain language. Throughout the memoir, Irena returns to the horrific image she’s witnessed of a baby shot by a German soldier, and she compares the baby to a bird. By the end of the memoir, Irena chooses to imagine this bird flying away, escaping the soldier, and thus she is able to reconcile the horrors she’s seen and live a life of hope. Like a bird, Irena is free to soar to great heights as she tells her story.
Lilacs
Irena’s parents fall in love, and Irena herself is born, during the “lilac time” of May in Poland, and lilacs function as a symbol of hope and rebirth throughout the memoir. The author describes the lilacs with enchanting, almost fairy tale-like language, with “the scent of lilacs luring my father into the water” (7) as he courts Irena’s mother. The lilacs represent innocence, a fragile beauty quickly lost with war, but at the same time, the lilacs reappear every year and offer hope of new life once the war ends. In addition, since the lilacs bloom around the time of Irena’s birthday, they provide a timeline of her coming-of-age in the midst of war; for instance, one year, Janina gives Irena a birthday bouquet which “reminded us of old, sweet times” (111).
Nature’s Indifference toward Human Violence
Throughout the memoir, Irena often marvels that the sun continues to shine and flowers bloom amid the devastation caused by humans. She calls it “a terrible irony of war, that nature itself does not rebel when man turns against his brother” (112), and returns to bird imagery to describe birds roosting peacefully in a tree while a child dies on the ground below them. This strange contradiction of a “sky [that] was still blue” (23) amid bombs and murder makes the war seem even more terrible, as the darkness of humanity contrasts with the beauty and light of the natural world. At the same time, nature serves as a reminder that the world does go on, reborn with new beauty no matter what horrors have taken place. At the end of war, the survivors similarly come “back to life” along with the natural world around them, as “the beauty of the countryside healed our spirits” (262).
“Only a Girl”
The phrase “only a girl” is first uttered by one of Irena’s Jewish workers, Steiner, who wonders how Irena can help the Jews when she is “only a young girl” (121). At first Irena shares his doubts, wondering how a girl can possibly do some good against the power of German soldiers, but she soon finds it is her very status as a girl that allows her to gain an advantage on her enemy without being perceived as a threat. As the memoir continues, being “only a girl” becomes a point of pride for Irena, until, by the end of the war, the phrase transforms into one of triumph. Describing her work as a partisan fighter, flirting with German soldiers as she smuggles money and information, Irena proudly proclaims that “if you are only a girl, this is how you destroy your enemies” (246).
