Tovah Feldshuh, one of the goddesses of Broadway, opened in a play last night that the people who write smart reviews for urbane publications will call mawkish, but for the audience of mere humans in the seats beyond the footlights, is a transcendent tale of courage and inspiration for our tumultuous times.

"Irena’s Vow" brings to the stage the little-known story of Irena Gut (May 5, 1918 – May 17, 2003), a young Catholic woman in Poland, who becomes separated from her family, and after surviving a collection of horrors first at the hands of the Russians and then the Germans, becomes the housekeeper — majordomo to a high-ranking Nazi officer — all the while hiding and protecting in the cellar 12 Jewish laborers from the SS.  After one hair-raising event after another, Irena delivers all 12 of her charges — plus the addition of an infant who was born, rather than aborted at the insistence of the strictly Catholic Irena — to safety after the fall of the Third Reich. Fifty years later, that infant seeks out Irena, who had immigrated to America, to invite her to Jerusalem to celebrate his own son’s bar mitzvah.

In 1982, Irena Gut Opdyke was named by the Israeli Holocaust Commission as one of the Righteous Among the Nations, a title given to gentiles who risked their lives by aiding and saving Jews during the Holocaust, and was presented with the Israel Medal of Honor (Israel’s highest tribute) in a ceremony at Jerusalem’s Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial. The Vatican has given her a special commendation, and her story is part of a permanent exhibit at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC.