In My Hands

Written by Armstrong following 'many, many hours of interviews' with Irene Gut Opdyke, this is the true story of one young woman's selfless fight against tyranny and persecution. Aged seventeen when Germany invades her native Poland in 1939, she immediately decides that if she is to be true to herself and to her ideals she must start to move against her country's oppressors. Her altruism comes gradually to focus on the plight of those Polish Jews whose extermination was part of the Nazi plan. By the time she is twenty, she can reflect, with some justification, that she has seen terrible things and that terrible things have been done to her. But her resourcefulness, resolution and indomitability see her through, allowing her to pass on these memories to a generation for whom the reality of the term 'Holocaust' is in danger of being forgotten or misunderstood.