In a unique feat of heroism, Irene Gut Opdyke, 4ft 11in tall and not yet 30 years old, singlehandedly snatched dozens of Polish Jews from the closing clutches of the SS and saved them from the Nazi gas chambers. Unlike Oskar Schindler, she had no influence, no factory and no resources to back her. She relied on her exceptional looks, her warm heart and her limitless courage.

The moment that changed the life of this Polish girl, one of five daughters born to a Roman Catholic family, came in April 1942 in Nazi-occupied Poland. Paralysed with horror, she had to look on as a Nazi officer tossed a Jewish baby into the air and shot it like a clay pigeon. As the baby boy fell dead to the ground, the course of Irene Gut’s life was clear.

At the time she was working as a forced labourer in a munitions factory in Ternopol. There she caught the eye and the fancy of a 70-year-old German major by name of Eduard Rugemer (the German Army in the East was so desperate for trained officers that it lifted all age limits). Major Rugemer found her an easier job in the kitchens of a hotel for German officers. This was situated close to the walls of the local ghetto, so each night she would gather leftovers, pack them in boxes, and smuggle them through the barbed wire fences into the ghetto. She continued to do this, undetected, for months.

Spurred by her success, she found a horse and buggy and, with an old priest, began to smuggle threatened Jews out of the ghetto and into the local forest. Throughout Poland the vast forests offered the only shelter to Jews on the run from the SS. Again and again she returned to the forests with food and blankets taken undetected from the German stores. Then Major Rugemer promoted her out of her kitchen job to be his housekeeper in the requisitioned villa he occupied. It had a large basement into which he never set foot. There she hid 12 Jews who had worked with her in the kitchens and in the laundry of the officers’ hotel and who were due for deportation to the gas chambers.

By day, while Major Rugemer was away on his staff duties, they would come out of hiding to help her with the housework. But as they were sweeping and polishing one day Rugemer came home unexpectedly early and found them. He made straight for the phone to inform the local SS chief. Before he could dial the number Irene Gut was pleading passionately for their lives. Rugemer offered her a deal: their lives in return for her body. So she became his mistress and her 12 protégés continued to live in the basement. As a good Catholic girl she confessed to the local priest, who told here that her immortal soul was more important than anyone’s mortal life. Her conscience could not accept this theology, and although she remained a Christian, she worshipped in her later years in Protestant churches.

As the Russian Army swept west-wards and Major Rugemer hurriedly left with the German occupying forces, Irene Gut and her protégés ended in the camps that the Russians set up for the human flotsam of war, the tens of thousands who became known as “displaced persons”.

Every one of her protégés was saved, and most later found their way to the new State of Israel. Amid the hunger, brutality and confusion that reigned in Central Europe immediately after the war, they repaid some of their debt by helping her to flee from Russian-occupied Poland into West Germany.

There she was interviewed by William Opdyke, an American United Nations worker. Three years later she obtained papers allowing her into the United States to start a new life. In New York she met Opdyke again, and six weeks later she was married to him. Starting a family and taking up work as an interior decorator in California, she locked her past out of her life.

Then, a quarter of a century later, she was asked to stand in at the last minute for a speaker at Opdyke’s Rotary Club. In a panic, she decided for the first time to talk about her past. A local paper reported what she said, and a new career opened up as an eye-witness speaker about the Holocaust — with, as her daughter put it, “a very thick Zsa Zsa Gabor accent”. Her book In My Hands: Memories of a Holocaust Rescuer sold more than a million copies.

In her last years both the Vatican and Israel’s Holocaust Memorial Institution, Yad Vashem, bestowed honours on Irene Gut Opdyke, and she was reunited with some of the people whose lives she saved.

Her husband predeceased her. She is survived by a daughter.

Irene Gut Opdyke, heroine of the wartime struggle to save Polish Jews, was born on May 5, 1918. She died on May 17, 2003, aged 85.