Change the room/ Irena's vow

2009.5.16
實習生活已經過了一半，六個月到了也是換房間的時候了。紐行男生宿舍是公司買的，女生宿舍是租的，兩個房間大小不同為了公平起見定下半年換房間的規定。我先抽到大房間，過慣了大空間的生活，今天整理東西要搬進小房間及小衛浴，真的有由奢返儉難的感覺，以後真要過著簡樸的生活了，因為沒什麼空間所以也不能再買東西了。

春天到了紐約豐富的藝文活動如花綻放，令人目不暇己。
一 Symphonyspace offers free show from 11am-11pm once or twice a year. The topic is "Wall to wall broadway"-a century of musicals. I listened various broadway music and the host even interact with audiences, we sang together.
二 On six avenue, 42st-59st, 有各國美食展，整條第六大道封鎖如墾丁的夜市般，無意間走過買了一支烤墨西哥玉米，玉米很甜加上不知名的醬很好吃。
三 Dance Parade:
據稱有四千名舞者參與這次的遊行，遊行的終點是東村的Tompkins square park. 美國是個喜歡跳舞的國家，音樂帶給人喜悅跳舞帶來活力，現場除了表演外，各式舞者穿著奇裝異服在你面前走fashion show,也有招生教學的，其中我最喜歡籃球場的全民共舞，拉丁音樂讓人不自禁的跟著旋律搖擺起來，在旁邊看也非常的賞心悅目。
四 Irena's Vow:
一個波蘭女子在二次大戰時親眼看到納粹屠殺猶太人，她暗暗向上帝發誓，如果能夠救活一條生命她一定會救到底，因此當她有機會當德國最高指揮官的管家時，她在老闆家藏了十二位猶太朋友，把自己的生死都置身事外，其中一對猶太婦人懷孕了，她拒絕婦人想要墮胎的意思，讓這寶寶在黑暗中順利誕生成為大家的希望，戰後這十二名猶太人都順利存活，甚至還幫忙她及指揮官
這齣戲很特別的是結尾時還請到Irena的獨生女來到現場解答觀眾的問題，本來以為這是Walter Kerr theatre給的禮物，後來才知道這也是劇情的一部分。
It is about love and forgiveness，會感動到掉淚的百老匯新劇。有位老太太問我看戲後的感想，並很感慨因為this is in her time,她年輕時發生的事情。不過這齣劇如果德國人看了不知道做何感想?

Irena's Vow

Few of the heroes of World War II were more courageous than those who risked their lives to protect potential victims of Nazi genocide. “Irena’s Vow,” a new play by Dan Gordon at the Baruch Performing Arts Center, is the dramatization of the true story of Irena Gut, a Polish Roman Catholic who managed to hide 12 Jews in the cellar of a house occupied by a German major.
Gut was a teenage nursing student when Germany invaded Poland. Joining the resistance, she was captured by Soviet forces, raped and beaten. Repatriated to Nazi-occupied Poland, she worked at a munitions plant, but her high school German caught the attention of Major Rugemer, the local commander, who transferred her to kitchen and laundry duties.
At the laundry, Irena meets 11 Jews; later, while working in the kitchen, she learns that the Jews in the laundry are to be exterminated.
After witnessing the brutal murder of a baby and its mother on the street, Irena makes the vow of the title: if she ever has the chance to save another life, she will. When the German major takes her in as his housekeeper, she devises a plan to hide the 11 Jews from the laundry, joined later by a 12th, in his coal cellar.

IRENA GUT OPDYKE (May 5, 1918 – May 17, 2003) was born Irena Gut into a Catholic family in the town of Kozienice in Central Poland, and studied nursing. During the German occupation of western Poland and the Russian occupation in the east, Irena joined a Polish underground unit. She was spotted by Russian troops, beaten, raped, and forced to work in a Russian medical unit. She escaped, only to be captured later by the Germans and forced to work in a munitions plant. An elderly SS officer Eduard Rugemer arranged her transfer to lighter duties in an army mess hall, which happened to afford her both a direct view into a Jewish ghetto, and a chance to slip food under its fence. When Rugemer was reassigned to Lvov and then Tarnopol (in what is now Ukraine), he requisitioned Irena as his housekeeper. There she supervised a laundry staffed by Jews, and when she heard that they were to be transported to a death camp, she undertook to hide 12 of them in Rugemer’s own villa and provide them with food and clothing. At a displaced persons camp after the war, Irena Gut met her future husband, a U.N. staffer named William Opdyke. They settled in Southern California, where she became an interior decorator. She did not talk about the war until she got a phone call as part of a survey on how many people doubted that the Holocaust ever happened. She began telling her story in schools, and 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, D.C.