Daughter of Holocaust survivor tells her mother’s story

Marrion — Jeanne Smith of Woodland, daughter of a Polish Holocaust survivor, shared her mother’s heroic stories to seventh- and eighth-grade students at Cascadia Montessori Middle School on April 12. Irene Gut Opdyke was a 16-year-old Polish Catholic nursing student when the Nazis invaded Poland and ended her nursing training. Forced into service in the German army, Opdyke used her position in an officers’ club to steal food and supplies for the Jews in the ghetto. She also smuggled Jews out of the work camps and hid a dozen of them in the home of a Nazi major for whom she was a housekeeper.