Ingram Irena (Szumska)

Irena Szumska Bernard Hellreich-Ingram was born in 1914 in the Tarnopol area, Galicia. He was brought up in a traditional Jewish home, graduated from the faculty of medicine at the University of Bologna, Italy, in 1937, and worked as a physician in Tarnów, Poland, until the occupation in 1939. In the hospital where he practiced was a 20-year-old Christian nurse, Irena Szumska. Soon, the Nazis took over Tarnów and established a ghetto. They began taking Jews away and murdering them. Bernard managed to escape the ghetto right before a large aktion. He was aided by Szumska, who took him to the small apartment she shared with her mother and sister. After the aktion was over, however, Bernard returned to the ghetto. He was soon sent to the Hloboczek concentration camp to serve as a doctor. As the days progressed, his life became more and more endangered. Once again, Szumska came to the rescue. She managed to extract Bernard from the camp and get him over to Nowy Sącz, where her university friend Marian Gołębiowski,* lived. Gołębiowski helped the two fugitives in every way possible, including finding for them shelter in another friend’s house and procuring false identification papers. This enabled Bernard to feel safer, but he insisted in moving to a discreet basement room in a remote location, where Irena helped him settle and brought him food on a daily basis. After liberation, Bernard married Irena and went back to practicing medicine. He wrote an autobiography about his experience in the war, called Unfinished Symphony. The couple eventually moved to Australia. While Irena was alive, she would not let Bernard seek recognition for her deed. It was only after she passed away that he approached Yad Vashem and asked for her to be honored. On September 16, 2009, Yad Vashem recognized Irena Szumska as Righteous Among the Nations.