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In My Hands By Irene Gut Opdyke Sparknotes

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In the book “In My Hands” by Irene Gut Opdyke, Irena fights through many battles throughout her life, she gets through most of them because of her beauty and her being a woman. Throughout the book, we know that Irena always fights for what she wants and for what is right, she is able to accomplish most of what she has done so far due to her beauty. Irena had just gotten caught with 2 Polish people, Clara and Fanka. Major Rugemer walks in and stares at all of them and asks Irena if they could speak in his office after he comes back from a party that he is heading to. After he's back, he walks into his office, finds Irena and he grabs her arm telling her that he will keep her secret, under no condition. That condition is sleeping with him. On page 214 it says “I've wanted you for so long Irene, do …show more content…

Throughout the book we see a bird in every one of the 3 chapters. Irena is at her home in Czestochowa, Irena and her mom found a baby stork that couldnt merge with the other storks so she and her mom did everything they could to “fix it”. Mamusia, as they call her, bandaged up the stork, letting it rest until it flew back to its family when it came back. We can find this on page 9 where it says “Mamusia flexed the storks wing and began to bandage it”. This shows that before Irena even knew what was going to happen in the future, a bird showed up with a broken wing, i think the broken wing represents Irena in her darkest time and Mamusia knows that the storks healing will take time, and from then and what's happening now, we can connect her past and the future with this stork because the storks wing was broken, Irena feels lost just like the bird, but as it heals and as Irena heals, in time her and the bird both that is a problem. As can be seen in this example that i thought of, birds always represent Irena when shes going through the roughest things in her

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In her memoir, In My Hands, Irene Gut Opdyke initially uses the motif of birds for dreaming and escaping daily life. During the war, the motifs start to get darker and we get a better idea of what they start to mean. She uses different motifs of birds to show how she uses birds to represent different events that had happened in her life, both traumatic and good. The importance of needing to accept help is shown throughout the entire book. Irene throughout most of the book tries to help others while trying to accept it for herself.

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The bird also symbolizes how people go too far with the amount of power they have. The bird has clipped wings, is trapped in a cage, and its feet are tied up, which means that the bird has no escape. The bird has no freedom and has no way to escape, because it cannot walk or run. Since the bird is being abused and has no power, it is traumatized and explains how its life is like a nightmare. In the text, it states, “His shadow shouts on a nightmare scream/his wings are clipped and his feet are tied” (Angelou paragraph 5).

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