Story of Jews Hidden in Hayloft Recalls Holocaust Courage
- Posted on:
- May 3, 2011
Fay Malkin, who nearly died before her 5th birthday while in a hayloft hiding from the Nazis, told a Holocaust remembrance gathering at UJA-Federation of New York on May 3rd: “Hitler didn’t win, we’re here.”
The dramatic story of Malkin’s family and two other families, hidden for nearly two years in Poland by a Christian woman and her daughter, became an award-winning documentary film in 2009. Malkin and her cousin Chaim Maltz, another person hidden with her, brought the story to life in front of nearly 200 as part of UJA-Federation’s annual Yom HaShoah commemoration.
John S. Ruskay, executive vice president and CEO of UJA-Federation, said to Malkin, “You honor us deeply by being here.” He spoke of the 38,000 Holocaust survivors in New York, saying, “They are, for me, victors,” and called them “remarkable examples of human resilience.”
Ruskay said it was “an honor and responsibility” to help Holocaust survivors, and cited programs that UJA-Federation supports for their benefit, including the new Community Initiative for Holocaust Survivors. The initiative calls for raising $20 million — $10 million for the care of survivors in New York, and $10 million for similar programs in Israel.
Malkin’s family lived in Sokal, then part of Poland and now in Ukraine. Before World War II, there were 6,000 Jews in Sokal. By the end of the war, only about 30 had survived, with half of them being sheltered by Francisca Halamajowa, a Polish Catholic woman. In 1942, just before the town’s Jewish ghetto was liquidated — but after Fay Malkin’s father and others were killed nearby in an old brick factory — the Malkin family, along with the Kindler family, went into hiding in the hayloft above a pigsty owned by Halamajowa.
A terrible choice
The families worried that 4-year-old Fay would give them away with her crying. She promised not to cry, but then couldn’t control herself once in the hayloft. After trying many other approaches, the adults finally made the excruciating decision to poison Fay in order to save the rest, who would have almost certainly been killed if they were discovered.
Malkin said her memory of the incident is faint, but she remembers pushing out the pill put in her mouth. Just before she was put in a bag to be buried, a doctor who was among those hiding felt a slight pulse. She was saved — “I became the miracle child,” she said. Having lived with the story her whole life, Fay smiled when she said that her crying after that was controlled by pillows.
For 20 months, the families stayed in the hayloft. Halamajowa and her daughter, Helena, risked their lives by feeding them surreptitiously and otherwise helping them, all the while disguising their actions from her neighbors and the occupying German army. In July 1944, the town was liberated by the Soviets. When the Malkin and Kindler families came down from the hayloft, they learned that Halamajowa had also been sheltering another Jewish family in a hole dug under her kitchen floor.
The transition back to freedom was exhilarating but difficult. The families went their separate ways, some to then Palestine and others, like Malkin, to the United States. For Fay and others, it was months before they could speak in normal voices again, so accustomed had they become to whispering.
Honored at Yad Vashem
Fay Malkin, like many other Jews hidden during the wartime period, spent many years afterward without speaking about the experience. Halamajowa died in Russia in 1960, not having revealed her secrets, but in 1986 she was honored at Yad Vashem as a Righteous Gentile.
In 2007, Malkin, Maltz, and several others returned to Sokal as part of the film project that led to No. 4 Street of Our Lady. A basis for the film was the diary kept by Moshe Maltz, Chaim’s father. Malkin said it was important but highly emotional going back to Sokal, especially seeing where her father was killed. Included in the group traveling there were two granddaughters of Halamajowa, who now live in Connecticut.
Ruskay said Malkin’s story was “extraordinary,” and that it was part of how “each year we come together to honor and remember the 6 million of our community who were destroyed.” He added, “We also remember the extraordinary Christian men and women, the righteous. These men and women risked their lives to hide Jews.”
'Moral obligation'
In introducing the program, UJA-Federation staff member Carla Schein said about the remembrance, “We have a moral obligation to speak out and tell the story.” Laura Sirowitz, another staff member, interviewed Malkin during the program and said it was part of an effort to have attention paid to “a remarkable yet little-known story.”
Malkin, Maltz, and other family and relatives of survivors participated in lighting candles to remember those killed in the Holocaust. Malkin said she has become active in recent years recounting the family history: “The point is to just remember what happened … to prevail.”
In the film, there is powerful testimony to that. At its end, No. 4 Street of Our Lady points out that the 15 people saved by Halamajowa have produced more than 100 descendents alive today.