Life, interrupted
Local woman tells how she survived the Shoa
To walk into Fran Malkin’s sunlit West Orange house is to be entranced immediately by all the stuff in it.
Stuff is an undignified word to describe a collection of art that is idiosyncratic, eclectic, fascinating, and overwhelmingly charming.
To interview her is to have to wrench your attention from the vaguely Deco four-panel tall screen of a woman dressed as various classical heroines, from the brightly painted antique furniture, from the awe-inspiring collection of cow magnets, from the paintings and drawings and other objects that combine to make not clutter, but life.
But Ms. Malkin did not have the joyous childhood, open to intellectual and artistic curiosity, exploration, and discovery, that her house displays now. Instead, for two years, beginning when she was 3 years old, she and 13 other family members lived above a pigsty, hidden by a Polish woman who risked her life with gruff goodness and now is recognized as Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem.
“I was born in 1938, in a town called Sokal, which is in Poland today but was in Ukraine then,” Ms. Malkin said. “When I came here, I was 10 years old, and for the next almost 70 years I didn’t talk about it. Not even to either of my husbands.
“I didn’t think about it. I wiped it away.”
Now, though, she’s telling that story — we can get to why later on.
Feiga Chasza Letzter, as she was then, lived in the Russian sector of a town that had been occupied by the Red Army after Hitler and Stalin split Poland between them. Before the Soviets came, her family had a good life. “My mother’s parents were cattle dealers, and my mother and father had a confectionary store,” she said. She has very few photographs from that part of her life, but she does have one of her parents, Eli Letzter and Lea Maltz Letzter, in that store. It was clearly elegant, upscale, very “Shop Around the Corner,” if anyone remembers that 1940 black-and-white classic film.
The Soviets uprooted the city’s life. “They took everything away from the people they called capitalist,” Ms. Malkin said; that included successful shopkeepers. “The Russians took a lot of people, so my family hid. They didn’t want to go with them. When the Germans came in, they routed the Soviets in an hour.
“We thought they were civilized. We thought that the Germans would be our salvation. But the people who went with the Russians were the lucky ones.
“And then they rounded up the men.
“They said that they were going to take them to work. There had been no work. There hadn’t been work for years.”
Her father was among those men. None of them came back. “I don’t remember him,” Ms. Malkin said.
It was the same excuse the Nazis used to get Jews into concentration camps. “Arbeit macht frei, right?,” she said, quoting the infamous saying over Auschwitz’s gates. “They were told to bring all their belongings. That’s why you see the pictures of people there with suitcases.”
The Germans herded the Jews who were left in Sokal after the men left, about 6,000 or so, into a ghetto they set up in town. “I was about 3 1/2 then,” she said. “I remember the yellow star.
“Everyone was packed into very close quarters. My father had three brothers and two sisters. They were still alive. His parents were still alive. It was terrible.”
One of her mother’s brothers, Sam Maltz, wrote letters, and her other brother, Moshe Maltz, wrote a diary. Both survived. Ms. Malkin has supplemented her often-wispy memories with information from those sources. “Sam described scenes like seeing a Jew walk down the street in the ghetto, and a Nazi would be passing by. The Jew would greet the Nazi, and the Nazi would say, ‘How dare you talk to me?’ and shoot him. And then another Jew would pass by a Nazi in the ghetto, and the Nazi would say, ‘How dare you not say hello to me?’ and shoot him.
“You could see that the plan was to kill every Jew. That’s what Hitler said. He said that Jewishness was in the blood, and conversion couldn’t clean it, so he would send all the Jews to die.”
The Jews of Sokal were shipped off to Belzec. “It was a death camp,” Ms. Malkin said. “The Germans would come into the ghetto, round up as many people as they could, put them in cattle cars on trains, and send them to Belzec. It was just about an hour away.
“The Germans had Jews helping them in the ghetto — the Germans killed them too — and the Germans told the Jews, ‘If you want to save your people, have them bring all their jewelry, furs, furnishings.’ The point was that they wanted to exterminate everybody — but they all wanted to get their stuff.”
One of Ms. Malkin’s uncles got a job with the railroad. “They had to clean the trains that came back empty from Belzec,” she said. “He wrote about finding papers from 18-year-old students that he had to clean.” He knew that they weren’t coming back. “He wrote, ‘Do you think it’s still worth it to go on living?’
“But my family felt that the only way that they could defeat the Germans was to go on living. You couldn’t fight them, but you could go on living.”
She remembers one German raid — an aktion, she calls it, using the German. “My mother had a brother who had just gotten married, and his wife took me to some lady who had set up a little bakery — not a bakery like we think of them, but she baked — and she gave me a napoleon. I remember how delicious it was.
“That night there was the aktion. Somebody grabbed my hand, and took me into hiding in a very small space. I was sitting on his lap the whole time, and the Germans were wandering around the house.”
The Germans didn’t find them because they didn’t always want to bother hunting Jews, she explained. They seemed to think that it might be easier to wait until the next time. They’d get them all eventually.
“That night, there was a little boy crying for a drink. Someone said he had to get a drink.” If not, they feared, the noise would make the Germans unable to overlook them. “So his father urinated into a cup, and gave it to him,” she said.
“Because my uncle worked at the railroad station, he knew what was going on,” she continued. “People would sneak out of the ghetto at night and ask their neighbors for help. Remember that this was a small place. Everyone knew everyone.
“Almost everyone said ‘no, we’ll be killed.’ Some said yes, and then turned the Jews in.
“My uncle went to see Franciszka Halamajowa, who lived with her 20-year-old daughter, Helena. Her brother turned him down — but she said yes.
“We never figured out why she said yes. She was very tough, with a strong sense of morality. She didn’t do it for the money.” (And, as Ms. Malkin noted, if she had, Yad VaShem wouldn’t have put her and her daughter among the Righteous.)
“She did it because it was the right thing to do.”
The group that left the ghetto that night included Ms. Malkin’s aunt, Chaya Devora, who had tuberculosis. The family “wanted a doctor with us, so my uncles asked the most prominent doctor in town, Dr. Kendler, his wife, and his two sons to come with us. They were Jewish. One of the sons was about my age, and the other was a teenager. He was hesitant about coming, but my uncle knew that there was going to be another aktion.
“We snuck out under the barbed wire at night and walked to her home.” There were 14 people in the group then.
The adults in the group discussed whether it was wise to bring a child with them. “I remember this — one of my uncles saying, ‘We can’t risk all these lives for one child. Why don’t we put her in front of a church or a convent? Usually someone there will take her in, and the parents will never return.’
“My mother promised that I wouldn’t cry.”
When they first arrived at Ms. Halamajowa’s house, “we walked to the back of the house. There was a little barn, with pigs downstairs — later, my uncle bought her more pigs — and a ladder that led to a trap door. We walked up. There was straw on the floor.”
And then, “at one point in the night, I started crying,” Ms. Malkin said. “I couldn’t stop crying. They couldn’t stop me. I remember this. At one point, Halamajowa started beating the pigs, so people outside heard them instead of me.”
From this point, Ms. Malkin quotes from her uncle Moshe’s book.
The next day, Ms. Malkin cried more. “At about 8 in the evening, Mrs. Halamajowa knocks on the door. We opened it, and she said, ‘You’ll have to do something. If this crying continues, it will be the end of all of us.
“We promised her that we would do something. After she left, we huddled together and discussed what to do. And we come to the terrible decision that we will have to kill her. We can’t endanger 13 others because of one child.”
Dr. Kendler had brought poison with him, in case they were captured, Ms. Malkin said. Then she continued to read.
“We cover her with blankets, and Dr. Kendler pours a spoonful of poison and pushes it between her lips. She makes a face and keeps crying. Some of the poison stays in her mouth.
“After a few minutes, she stops crying. Her eyes close. She appears to be unconscious. She does not seem to be breathing.
“We all squat around the little figure, as if we were already sitting shiva. No one makes a sound. My sister does not.
“And then, she whispers, ‘I forgive you for what you have done to my child — as long as God forgives you.’”
Ms. Malkin stops quoting. “There was a river that ran by the barn,” she said. “She told me that her plan was to jump down into the river and kill herself.”
Then she returns to the book.
“Two hours later, Mrs. Halamajowa comes in with a big bag. ‘The child’s soul is with God now,’ she says. ‘Now put her in this bag, and I’ll bury her.’
“Dr. Kendler leans forward to put the little limp body, and as he touches the child, his sensitive hands feel something.
“He whispers, ‘There is a pulse. I can feel it.’
“It takes a moment to grasp what the doctor is saying. The child wasn’t killed by the dose of poison he gave her. It is nothing short of a miracle.”
The families lived in that barn for 22 months. “We were almost caught a number of times, but we made it,” Ms. Malkin said. Her aunt died of tuberculosis and was buried under an apple tree near the house, but everyone else survived. “We knew that we had to bear witness,” she continued. “I remember that one time in the barn, someone said that when the Germans come, we should split up. Maybe some of us will survive. Letting the world know would be revenge.”
The town was liberated in 1944. “We were right on the Russian border, so the Soviets came into our town,” she said. “Germans had been quartered there during the war, and they left.
“I was 6 years old, and because we’d whispered, I couldn’t speak out loud. But we hadn’t been hungry.”
When the Russians came, the family decided that it might be safer to go back to their old homes. But before that happened, there was another surprise.
“Franciszka told us that she had been hiding a family of three Jews in her basement. We hadn’t known about them.
“And there were German soldiers quartered in her house during the war.”
That was not accident but strategy.
“The Ukrainians and the Poles were enemies.” Ms. Halamajowa was a Pole. “The Ukrainians would post notes on her house to try to scare her out, so she came up with an idea. She started making parties for the Germans in her house. Her daughter, who worked in the post office, was a pretty woman. They had a good time at the parties, so they thought she was a good Nazi.”
Ms. Halamajowa also hid a German soldier who had deserted the Nazis in her attic. “He didn’t want to fight,” Ms. Malkin said. “She probably talked him out of it.”
That story has a tragic ending. The Russians found the German, and they captured both him and Ms. Halamajowa. “They called him a Nazi spy,” she said. “Everybody went to plead with the Russians to let her go. Many of the Russian soldiers were Jewish, and one of them said, ‘For saving Jews, she deserves a medal, but for saving a Nazi, she deserves to hang.’
“They hung the soldier. My family begged to save him, but it was too late. But my family fought to have Franciszka released, and she was.
“When she was released, she was going to go home, but my uncle Sam said that he didn’t trust those people. He went to her house, found Russian soldiers waiting for her, ready to arrest her again, so he took her across Poland to be with her daughter,” who had long since gotten married and moved away.
There’s also a twist to the Halamajowa story that pleases Ms. Malkin greatly. Franciszka was a devout Catholic. Eventually the family made its way to Connecticut. Helena’s daughter Grace’s son married a Jewish woman, a doctor, “and they’re raising their children Jewish” — as in fact they are halachically — Ms. Malkin said.
It wasn’t until after liberation that Ms. Malkin’s mother learned that the group of men, including her husband, who had been taken away for work had been marched to the local brick factory and shot. Murdered. Until then, she had stayed in town to look for him; once she learned the truth, “she said, ‘There is no hope here,’” her daughter reported. “‘We are leaving.’”
“The war was still going on. But we left. My mother found a place in Lvov, and we lived in an apartment in Krakow. We would meet people, and the word always was to go west.
“We kept moving. I don’t know the details. I never talked about it with my mother. I remember crossing the border from Hungary to Austria. I remember traveling by train. It was chaos. The family met in Krakow. They had hired a Russian driver to take them there, and he was drunk, had an accident, and my grandmother was killed. So she lived through the war, lost a daughter, and then was killed by a drunk driver.
“We got to Austria, and first we were in the British sector and then the American. The DP camps in Austria had doctors. They had schools” — Ms. Malkin had never been in school until then. “That’s where I learned that I had TB.
“I remember being isolated in the DP camps because I had TB. I was in and out of sanitariums, sometimes with my mother, sometimes not. I did not eat.
“We were going to go to Palestine — when we were in hiding, we’d say we would go there — but my grandmother had a brother and four sisters in America. They connected with them — they would read newspapers like the Forward to look for them — and so we came here on January 17, 1949, on a ship called the Marine Flasher.”
Mother and daughter landed in Boston and moved to Newark; Ms. Letzter’s brothers and their families lived nearby, in Elizabeth.
At first, “I didn’t speak English,” Ms. Malkin said. “None of us did.
“But I went to Weequahic High School, and I learned English pretty fast.” (Now, Ms. Malkin’s English is flawless; there’s the hint of an accent around some consonants, but you have to listen pretty closely to hear them.) Her best friend, Barbara, also was a survivor; each knew the other was a survivor, but they never told each other their stories. Neither of them wanted to talk about it.
“I didn’t fit in right at Weequahic,” Ms. Malkin said. Much later, when people who had been in her class learned about her past, they were surprised. “Why didn’t you ever tell us?” she reported them asking her. But she simply couldn’t, and so she didn’t.
Her mother, who never remarried, worked in factories. Ms. Malkin didn’t go to college. “After high school, I went to work as a secretary,” she said. “That was what you were supposed to do. But I hated it, so I got a real estate license, and I was a commercial real estate broker for 40 years. I did like that.”
She married twice. Her first husband, Sandy Schonberger, was the father of her daughter, Debbi. After her divorce, she married Milton Malkin, a West Orange attorney, and the family moved to Livingston. He died 15 years ago, and she talks about him with great love. She’s now the doting grandmother of Maggie Rose and Jessica Ellie; the family lives in Vermont.
Meanwhile, Ms. Malkin’s uncle Moshe Maltz’s granddaughter, Judy Maltz, “was born in Newark, but was a journalist in Israel for a number of years, and her husband, Amit Schejter, is a professor of communication and technology. In the early 2000s, her husband got a position at Penn State, and she went there with him.”
During that time, Ms. Maltz decided to make a documentary about her family’s story. “She said, ‘For 20 years I have been telling other people’s stories. I have my own.’”
Then came the big ask.
“‘Would you consider coming back to Sokal with me?’” Ms. Malkin said Ms. Maltz asked her. “I jumped at the chance. Nineteen of us went back.”
The result was a documentary, “No. 4 Street of Our Lady.”
“We worked on it for three or four years, and the film came out in 2010.”
Until then, the only time Ms. Malkin had been public about her story was in a writers workshop for Holocaust survivors at Drew University. “There were about two dozen survivors who told their stories, and the book was published,” she said. “Everybody had four to six pages in it. Many of the people in that book are gone now.
“And after that I didn’t talk about it again.”
But when she went back to Sokal, it was different.
“I had never known my father, and I had never had a father figure,” she said. “I grew up without my father, and I never cried for him.
“When we got to Sokal, and we went to the old brick factory, for the first time I cried for him.
“It had such an impact on me that I have never been the same since then.
“I cried, and then I got very angry. Nothing in the film was rehearsed. They just said go talk about my life. And my life, my mother’s life, my father’s life would have been different. Everything was destroyed. The only thing that he did wrong was that he was Jewish. And so it came to me that if Israel — and yes, now things are a little different — but if Israel had existed back in those years, this wouldn’t have happened.
“We must support Israel. If it’s strong, we will be okay. If it goes, we are screwed.”
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