Irena’s Vow: an extraordinary story of wartime heroism, plainly told

Irena Gut was 19 when Nazi Germany then the Soviet Union invaded Poland and spent much of the war hiding 12 Jewish people in the cellar of her high-ranking Wehrmacht employer. This extraordinary feat of courage and imaginative chutzpah carries Louise Archambault’s plainly told film, adapted by screenwriter Dan Gordon from his own 2009 Broadway play. 

Sophie Nélisse plays Irena as a wide-eyed ingenue, deciding with innocent conviction to smuggle Jewish co-workers into the chateau of Major Rügemer (Dougray Scott), where she is employed as housekeeper with their secret help. Their noise in the supposedly near empty house is blamed on “rats” by Rügemer, who is unknowingly repeating antisemitic slurs. These hidden figures have a phantom, fairy tale presence, as if they exist not beneath the floorboards but in the very fabric of their oppressors’ house. Scott makes punctilious, lonely Nazi figure of Rügemer the film’s sole mystery. At one point, Archambault shows him staring in a mirror, letting us imagine what he sees, before he twists his head and her camera floats away.  

Archambault’s previous features were gentle French-Canadian dramas such as And the Birds Rained Down (2019) and Thanks for Everything (2019) that focused on intimate relationships. On Irena’s Vow, with cinematographer Paul Sarossy, she foreswears formal flourishes for straightforward mise-en-scéne and naturalistic lighting, making clean digital footage of a ghetto market appear almost contemporary, and an eruption of Nazi violence even more shocking. Gut’s autobiography documents a Nazi dashing a Jewish baby to the ground as the catalyst which made her vow to save lives where she could. Archambault mostly refracts this atrocity through Irena’s window-screened vantage point. 

Dan Gordon is best known as the screenwriter for Norman Jewison’s Oscar-winning boxing drama The Hurricane (1999), with more recent credits in evangelical Christian cinema. As an American-born IDF veteran who knew the real Gut, his commitment to Irena’s Vow’s cause clearly runs deep. Her insistence on a Jewish couple keeping a baby when abortion seems safer suggests her Catholic faith, and she is shown praying in saintly light.  

Irena’s Vow continues the understandable preference since Schindler’s List (1993) for vignettes of goodness and hope over the camps’ overwhelming hopelessness. As the Holocaust’s infinite human dramas fade from living memory, her brave story bears telling.  

► Irena’s Vow is in UK cinemas 25 March.