A Catholic nurse, a Nazi officer, and Jews in the basement: Irena’s Vow

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The traditional Catholic view of the Eighth Commandment, championed by Augustine and Thomas Aquinas and affirmed in the “Catechism of the Catholic Church,” is that lying is never permissible, full stop. Among various challenges to this teaching in its full rigor, few have had quite the sticking power of the “Nazi at the door, Jews in the basement” scenario: Can it be permissible to lie to Nazis to save Jews from genocide?

“Irena’s Vow,” based on a true story, goes two steps further. First, the scenario here is “Jews in the basement, Nazi in the master bedroom.” I don’t know how many people from Poland, the Netherlands and elsewhere have been accounted “Righteous Among the Nations” by Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center, for seeking to hide Jews in their houses from the Nazis—but there can’t be many who dared to hide Jews in the basement of a villa under the nose of the Nazi officer occupying the villa.

Second, “Irena’s Vow” builds to a morally charged crisis some may find more challenging than the one about lying: Can it be permissible not to resist a sexual assault by a Nazi to save Jews from genocide?

Sophie Nélisse (“The Book Thief,” “Yellowjackets”) plays Irena Gut, a young Polish nurse in Warsaw during the Nazi occupation in 1939. Initially pressed by the Nazis into grueling factory work, Irena struggles to hide her anemia and weakness. When she catches the eye of an older Nazi officer, Major Eduard Rügemer (Dougray Scott), she’s reassigned to a hotel in Tarnopol used by the Nazis, where she’s given kitchen and serving duties as well as management of a team of eleven Polish Jews employed by the Nazis in the laundry as tailors. They are not tailors (one is a nurse like Irena; another is a lawyer), but everyone must find some way to be an essential worker.

In her new position Irena is sometimes able to pass vital information overheard among Nazis in the dining room to her laundry staff, who get the word out to targeted areas in the ghetto. Then two things happen: First Irena learns that the SS finally mean to liquidate the entire ghetto and deport all Jews—including her laundry staff. Second, Rügemer requisitions a villa on a large estate, and he assigns Irena to be his housekeeper. Irena hatches a desperate plan: she will move her friends into the villa, which is large enough that they should be able to hide from the official occupant.

Directed by Louise Archambault and adapted by Israeli-American writer Dan Gordon from his own stage play, “Irena’s Vow” was filmed in Poland but shot mostly in English, with occasional snatches of Polish, German, and Hebrew. It’s an effectively restrained drama with familiar war-thriller elements, at times recalling “The Hiding Place,” adapted from Dutch Reformed writer Corrie ten Boom’s memoir of her family’s efforts at hiding Jews in North Holland. A striking sequence involves a Christmas party at the villa with Germans drunkenly belting out O Tannenbaum while in hiding the Jews quietly sing a Hannukah blessing as they pass around a single candle.

At times Irena’s secret teeters on the edge of discovery as Rügemer encounters one hint after another that he and Irena seem to be not alone in the house. Irena is well served by her steady nerves and shrewd wit as well as her pretty face, which Rügemer may not be quite able to suspect of serious deceit. Even when the question of Jews hiding in the villa is explicitly raised more than once, Irena manages to play her cards with nerve-racking boldness.

What makes “Irena’s Vow” stand out among similarly themed films are two crises that can’t be dodged or parried. First comes the ominous discovery that Ida (Eliza Rycembel), wife of Lazar (Aleksandar Milicevic), is pregnant. Under circumstances where even a cough could be disastrous, a crying baby is unthinkable, and the unofficial house guests plan to abort the child—but Irena, who is Catholic, refuses to help and begs them to reconsider. Here the meaning of the film’s title is revealed, and the story draws a powerful line between the murder of an infant by an SS officer and taking a life in the womb. (The remarkable pro-life resonance of this scene takes on new power in a de rigueur credits sequence with images of the real people.)

Next comes the seemingly inevitable moment when either the house guests make a mistake, or Rügemer appears where he is not expected, and Irena has no more cards to play. Then Rügemer’s shock and despair take a darker turn. Irena, in 1940s Eastern Europe, lacks the concepts and vocabulary of consent and coercion to clearly identify what follows as serial rape, even sexual slavery. Some Catholic viewers, perhaps thinking of saints like Maria Goretti—or rather of popular piety around such saints—may have a similar difficulty.

Maria Goretti is sometimes said to have chosen “death over sin”—as if the only morally permissible response to attempted rape is attempted resistance to the death. By that flawed thinking, Irena, who recognizes that if she resists Rügemer or tries to flee, eleven Jews will die along with her, may be judged as choosing an intrinsically evil means to a good end. Even Catholics who have no problem with lying to Nazis to save Jews may draw a moral line at the idea of a woman (already a captive, a forced laborer) unresistingly allowing her captor to have sex with her in order to spare other threatened lives as well as her own.

Though Irena lacks the moral framework to explain why, she intuitively understands that submitting to Rügemer is not sinning against God. According to the memoir of the real Irena Gut Opdyke, in confession during this crisis, she could only tell the priest that she had “become the mistress of a German officer in order to preserve the lives of my Jewish friends.” The priest predictably refused her absolution, but she believed, soundly, that she “had God’s blessing.”

Nélisse carries much of the movie with her steady gaze and carefully controlled calm demeanor. Scott makes Rügemer a queasily human monster: a fiend who wants the illusion of his own decency, who on some level doesn’t want the war he’s a part of, and who, in his perverse way, cares about Irena. Despite the difficulty of making nearly a dozen supporting characters in hiding stand out as individuals, the film manages to give them the dignity of at least some personality and some agency, from discovering the villa’s secrets to dealing with the worst near-exposure crisis.

Like all such films, “Irena’s Vow” challenges viewers to ask themselves—to ask ourselves—what we might have done in such circumstances. Would we collaborate? Would we resist? If so, how? There is, of course, no way to know for sure. And yet the question is not really about what we would hypothetically have done in the past, but who we actually want to be in the present. The challenges that face us today are different, but we are all made of the same stuff, and souls, if not lives, hang on the decisions we make every day, above all our own.

Steven D. Greydanus, a deacon for the Archdiocese of Newark, has been writing about film since 2000, when he created Decent Films, for film appreciation and criticism informed by Catholic faith. For 10 years he co-hosted the Gabriel Award–winning cable TV show “Reel Faith” for New Evangelization Television, has appeared frequently on Catholic radio and written for a number of Catholic outlets.