In My Hands is a memoir written by Irene Gut Opdyke, focusing on her years as a young woman living in Poland during World War II. The memoir opens with a brief musing entitled “Tears,” where Opdyke creates, in poetic language reminiscent of a fairy tale, a description of Poland’s origins that is at once mythical and historical. She depicts Polish trees weeping tears of amber and ends with a mention of “tears of another sort” (1) that come along with the German invasion in 1939, which will provide the main conflict.

Chapter 1begins by describing a moment before Irena Opdyke’s birth: May Day 1921, the “lilac time” of the chapter’s title and the day her parents were drawn together.

In the small Polish village of Kozienice, Opdyke’s mother, Maria Rębieś, is participating in the young women’s May Day tradition of sending a “boat”—a block of wood with her name written on it, topped with a lit candle—down the river. The young men of the village are waiting for the boats downstream, and among them is Władysław Gut, an architect and chemist who is in town to supervise the building of a ceramics factory. Gut isn’t planning to participate in what he views as an “ancient folk custom” (6), but he finds himself drawn to one boat that floats apart from the others.