As it happens, I interviewed Opdyke on my radio show 20 years ago and again 12 years later, and she revealed to me how conflicted she was about what she consented to do not only because she became what fellow Poles derided as a “Nazi whore” but because as a deeply religious Catholic she was sure she was committing a grave sin by regularly sleeping with a man to whom she was not married and worse, indeed a married man, which likely rendered her sin of adultery a mortal sin.
What she did therefore, was not only heroic because she had to overcome daily fear of being caught and put to death, but because she also had to overcome a daily fear of committing a mortal sin before God.
Aside from my lifelong interest in altruism and especially in understanding the motivations of rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust, I had an unwitting role in the making of “Irena’s Vow.” According to the playwright, Gordon, the play came about because he heard Opdyke on my radio show 20 years ago. He immediately contacted her, they became friends, and the rest is history.
We never know all the good (or bad) we have done. So Gordon’s attribution of the genesis of his play to me is very gratifying. If there was a dry eye on opening night this past Sunday when I attended, it surely wasn’t near my seat.
It is rare to see a play on Broadway that is preoccupied with goodness. It is even more rare to see Broadway play extol the goodness of a religious person. When was the last Broadway show about a Christian hero? In this upside-down age that is hypersensitive to any criticism, no matter how fair, of any aspect of Islam but which regularly depicts many American Christians as buffoons and quasi-fascists, one can only hope that this play has a long run. Likewise, in an age when art increasingly celebrates the ugly and the bad, one can only hope that a million young people see a play that celebrates the goodness that God-based morality can produce.