Halina Peabody
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SUSAN SNYDER:
Good afternoon, and welcome to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. My name is Susan Snyder and I am a curator here at the museum. Thank you for joining us. We are on our 10th anniversary or year of First Person and our guest today is Halina Peabody. We shall meet Halina shortly, but before we meet her I just wanted to give you some background.
This 2009 season of First Person is made possible through the generosity of the Louis and Dora Smith Foundation, to whom we are grateful for again sponsoring First Person.
First Person is a series of weekly conversations with survivors of the Holocaust, who share with us their firsthand experiences associated with the Holocaust. Each First Person serves as a volunteer here at the museum and with few exceptions we will have a First Person guest each Wednesday through August 26th. We will also have First Person Programs on Tuesdays in April through July.
The Museum’s website www.ushmm.org provides a list of upcoming First Person guests. This year we are offering a new feature associated with First Person. Excerpts from our conversations with survivors will be available as podcasts on the museum’s website. Several are already posted and within a few weeks we will have Halina’s posted as well.
The First Person podcasts join two other museum podcast series, Voices on Antisemitism and Voices on Genocide Prevention. They are also available through iTunes.
Halina will share her First Person account of her experience during the Holocaust and as a survivor for about 40 minutes. We will follow with an opportunity for you to ask Halina questions.
Before you are introduced to her, I have a few announcements and requests of you. First, if possible, please stay in your seats for the entire program so it is not disturbing to Halina who will be speaking. Second, if we have time for questions toward the end of our program please make your question as brief as you can. I’ll repeat the question so the audience can hear it and Halina can hear it. Finally, please turn off any cell phones or pagers that you may have that may be on.
I would also like to let you know that if you have tickets for the Permanent Axhibition…the Permanent Exhibition tickets for today will be honored for the rest of the day and for the balance of the afternoon. Don’t worry if you tickets are for this time period between one and two.
The Holocaust was the state-sponsored, systematic persecution and annihilation of European Jewry by Nazi Germany and its collaborators between 1933 and 1945. Jews were the primary victims; six million were murdered. Roma and Sinti (Gypsies), people with mental and physical disabilities, and Poles were also targeted for destruction or decimation for racial, ethnic or national reasons. Millions more, including Soviet prisoners of war and political dissidents also suffered grievous oppression and death under Nazi Germany.
This photograph features Halina Litman, her mother and her Aunt Irka in 1938. This is a map, a detailed map of Poland in Europe. Halina was born in Krakow on December 12th, 1932. She was the daughter of Ignacy and Olga Litman. Halina survived the war in Jaroslaw, Poland to where the arrow points. This map shows a close-up of Krakow in relation to Jaroslaw.
Halina her mother and sister survived the war under false papers identifying the family as Catholics that her mother purchased from a priest. On the way to Jaroslaw the family ran into a Polish man who threatened to reveal their identity. Halina’s mother struck a bargain with the man using their tickets for the luggage, all the money she had and the coats they are wearing in this photograph.
This is the house where Halina and her family stayed in Jaroslaw. And here’s a photograph of Halina with her sister Eva celebrating Christmas in hiding. Halina’s mother decided the safest place for her to hide was in plain sight. She found a job at a German headquarters peeling potatoes for the German troops and this is a photograph of the headquarters where Olga worked.
After the war Halina and her family immigrated to England and in this 1946 photograph Eva, Halina’s sister, presents flowers to General Anders, commander of the Polish army in exile.
Please join me in welcoming Halina Peabody.
Thank you very much Halina. It’s really very nice to have a chance to get to know your story better. As you know, I’ve known you for many many years, but knew the very basics and I appreciate you sharing such personal information with me. And I thought we had some very interesting conversations beforehand.
I would like to…you were from the town of Zaleszczyki. I had to practice that many times, sorry. When I was reading over some of you material you described that your father, who was a dentist…the reason you came to Zaleszczyki was for his profession. Can you talk a little bit about the pre-war life and how he came to be a dentist?
HALINA PEABODY:
Right. Our families are all from Krakow that’s why…I was born in Krakow and my mother would come to her mother in Krakow to have me and then my sister as well. And so, when she met my father he was just starting his career as a dentist. So they felt that they wanted to have a place where was as a smaller place and where they needed a dentist and they found this wonderful little place called Zaleszczyki, which was at the very bottom sort of East in Poland near Romania. Right on the river Dniester, which was a natural frontier with Romania.
So he opened his first surgery there. Very early because it was even before I was born.
That was, that’s my history that I’m telling you. We lived in this little place until 1939. We had a wonderful, wonderful life. I was the first child. My mother had been a swimming champion of Poland for three years running. In Krakow I was a young girl and she used her skills to do a lot of stuff on the river. We did a lot of kayaking and she taught little children I understand how to swim.
We also did some winter sports because Zaleszczyki had a wonderful climate. Four definite seasons. Summer was very hot, we had grapes and apricots, cherries growing in our garden and in the Winter everything was frozen over and we skated over the river and skied in the snow. Of course there was also Autumn and Spring which was really beautiful. So life was really lovely and all I had to worry was about which bicycle I was going to learn next. So that was my life until I was close to seven years old.
SUSAN SNYDER:
And you were you would describe your family as being assimilated Jews. That you were culturally Jewish, not necessarily religious, but that you recognized yourselves as Jews.
HALINA PEABODY:
Correct, correct. The professionals usually were not too religious and my father and mother belonged to that group. But I do know that I learned how to even sign my name in Hebrew. I was about to go to Hebrew school.
Also, my father had taught me to read and write in Polish before the war, because I was the first and he wanted his daughter to be able to read the newspaper by the age of six. So I don’t remember at all, but my mother tells me that there were lots of screams and yells, but as far as I knew I always knew how to read and write.
At the same time, my mother was a wonderful knitter and she could embroider and did beautiful work.
She taught me how to embroider, remember embroidering? And she use to knit for my dolls. I had a very pretty doll called Shirley Temple, which I can’t find now, and I still miss her. So that was our life then and as I said we spent a lot of time on the beach.
SUSAN SNYDER:
In 1939, in September 1939, when the Nazi’s entered Poland. Well right, Poland was partitioned. You were living in the East so you were occupied by Russia. Can you describe what happened to your father? What happened to the family in general?
HALINA PEABODY:
Yes, when the war broke out in 1939 of course I didn’t know anything previously to that, but there were rumors and I wasn’t quite seven, so I didn’t know really much about what was going on, but there was a complete panic when it was learned that the Russians were going to occupy us.
What happened was that Germany and Russia made a pact and they were going to take half of Poland. The Northern part would go to the Germans and the other half, where we were, went to the Russians. So the Russians were coming in, and since we were right on the Romanian boarder a lot of people went into a great deal of panic and decided to grab whatever they could and rushed over across the river to Romania.
Now my sister was born two months before the war so she was just a little baby and my father was concerned that there would be no milk. He thought it was too much and anyway he thought, and a lot of other people thought, was that the men were the ones in danger because during the First World War apparently it was the men who were in danger.
So he and some other guys and some other people just went over the river. We had a bridge, it was just a few minutes walk across the river. And he was one of them, so we were left alone and that was very frightening obviously to my mother who had this little baby and me, but that’s what happened in that time.
The Russians came in and some of the people who went to Romania started rethinking the fact, that maybe it wasn’t so terrible, perhaps they should try to come back. They tried over a frozen river to cross back. The guys had a sheet, a white sheet and they tried to just crawl back. However, the Russians had sealed the boarder by then and they were caught and that was when my father was put on trial and told that he was a spy, because he went back and forth. And he was given 20 years hard labor and sent off the Siberia.
SUSAN SNYDER:
So as far as you and you mother knew, he was sent to Siberia, he was arrested, he was imprisoned. And at this point your mother had to decide what to do about you and your baby sister Eva. What did she do?
HALINA PEABODY:
Well, that’s not very clear to me, I think that the technician that was working for my father helped a lot by continuing to work a little bit and our friends, our good friends helped us as much as they could. The problem was that the Russians considered us family of a criminal because of my father and therefore what happened was that we were packed and ready because they were going to take us to Russia as well.
What happened next was that somebody talked them out of it and for some lucky or unlucky reason we remained. However, we were thrown out of our house and we ended up in a little place just out of Zaleszczyki called Tłuste. It was a little town, further up and I know my mother found a place there to live and that was the picture that was the only picture…
SUSAN SNYDER:
Do you know how she found the place?
HALINA PEABODY:
No idea.
SUSAN SNYDER:
How long were you in Tłuste?
HALINA PEABODY:
I don’t know. Well we were there until the Germans walked in, so I think…
SUSAN SNYDER:
’41, close to ’41?
HALINA PEABODY:
I think ’41, yes right. The Russians left June ’41 and July the Germans arrived, July ‘41.
SUSAN SNYDER:
What was it like in Tłuste?
HALINA PEABODY:
In Tluste? Well we were with a farmer and as far as I know we were there fine and we had food and we were just living there for awhile, but I don’t have many recollections as to what else happened. Though there didn’t seem to be any danger at that time, just my mother was very worried about the children all the time.
SUSAN SNYDER:
You went back to, eventually…
HALINA PEABODY:
When the Germans came in, when the Russians left, so we came back to Zaleszczyki and we moved back into our house.
SUSAN SNYDER:
So the Germans actually moved farther east, they occupied your town.
HALINA PEABODY:
They broke the agreement and walked in and took over the rest of Poland, yes.
SUSAN SNYDER:
And when you were back in Zaleszczyki, did the Germans…did they frighten you as a child? Were you frightened by them?
HALINA PEABODY:
Very much so because they started putting new rules in. First of all, they had everybody, everybody had to be working for the Germans. Of course at no pay. Well I was too young to work, but my mother who was known for a good knitter was told that she would be knitting for the Mayor, the German Mayor of the town. And everybody else was also doing something for the Germans, even cleaning streets or whatever.
They created this committee, this Jewish Committee called the Judenrat, which was the elders of the Jewish community. They worked through the Jewish community, whatever they wanted from us, it went through the Jewish Committee. They demanded we bring in all our gold, silver, artwork, furs, anything of value, money, we were supposed to give to them. We had nothing for ourselves and also we were told to put yellow stars on the houses and we had yellow…
SUSAN SNYDER:
So just to clarify, you were, you had mentioned the Judenrat so the Judenrat was an organization that was created forcibly through the Jewish community, but it was a way for the Nazi’s to, they would order the Judenrat to carry out specific tasks. And when you mention the Star of David, this was something that was forced upon you. What would happen if you didn’t have the Star of David on?
HALINA PEABODY:
Oh it didn’t take much, life was cheap you know. You know, if you got caught, you died. It was almost immediate, but as I said, at that point we were still very obliging because everybody really wanted to help. Everybody wanted to cooperate because we all thought things would be okay if we cooperated. So people were cooperating and you know…
SUSAN SNYDER:
And then sometime after the Germans invaded, they called a group of people to the center of town, took them away…well you mentioned to wrap trees.
HALINA PEABODY:
They put out a call, they wanted a group of volunteers, mainly young people to come, because they needed people to work in a…just outside the city was an old military camp. Now I’ve been telling about these wrapping of the tree trunks. I think that in DC when it’s very cold and they put new saplings, new trees, they wrap the trunks of the trees.
And because Poland was so cold in the winter, it was quite natural that they would want to wrap the trees. So that was their request, that they said they would have to come out there and wrap trees around so that they wouldn’t die during the winter and nobody had any suspicions so that everybody came, a lot of people came, even women and all the people, they all came. They just wanted to cooperate and they walked them up the street and then we waited for them to come back.
And that was when nobody came back. And that was the first shock that we had. We didn’t know what was happening and we just kept asking each other, where are they? And then a young woman came, she apparently saw what was going on and ran for her life. The Germans shot after her and she tripped and fell. They were so busy doing whatever they were doing, that they didn’t notice that she was not killed and she told us they story.
The story was that they were made to dig a communal grave and that then they were shot over the grave. That’s where they were all buried and she was the only survivor. Of course that shook us all very much and as young as I was, this was the first time I started really paying attention to what was happening and really getting scared because we all realized their intent was to kill us rather than do anything with us.
SUSAN SNYDER:
And your mother actually, before the second round up of Jews in the community, your mother had some warning about it. Can you describe how she was warned, what happened, what she did with you people, with you and your sister Eva?
HALINA PEABODY:
Yes, what happened was that when the next time they asked for a group of people supposedly to go to work in Germany, again they were suppose to gather in the square and of course everyone was trying to escape. We had warning that they were going to do that and my mother made a deal with a cook that we use to have across the street and she would keep us during the time they were collecting people.
So she took us over there and that’s where we spent the day when they were collecting people. And again, they collected the number they needed and they went around to houses with yellow stars, if they didn’t have enough. And they were loaded on the train and they disappeared as well.
SUSAN SNYDER:
And do you know where these people went?
HALINA PEABODY:
I don’t know where they went, I think some of them ended up in concentration camps, but I don’t think so. I don’t know what they did with them.
SUSAN SNYDER:
But at this point your mother could assume that any kind of a round up meant death.
HALINA PEABODY:
She immediately, even after the first one she assumed that and I know that because she said so. And then you see there were so many people killed from the Jewish community by then that the Germans wanted to make it easy for themselves, so they threw us out. They cleared the whole area so to speak and they pushed us in to Touste where we had been before during the Russians. So we went back to that town and we had sort of communal houses there again with the yellow stars and everybody started looking for hiding places and digging places. Just to be able to hide the next time there was going to be a round up.
However, my mother said to me that that wasn’t going to work because what they do is they move us again so we lose all those spaces. There was no place to hide. She was very very concerned, she started looking for various ways to have us taken and adopted, or taken over the river to Romania again. She tried various groups and somehow nothing worked out.
So the next time when they decided to collect people again. They again demanded a certain amount of people and my mother did not want to go into hiding with the others in the house for some reason, she didn’t want to go to the basement, but she made arrangements with a couple of farmers. One farmer had me in the loft and the other farmer was supposed to keep her and my baby sister. All day we were hidden that way. I was worried all day long that she was caught and she was worried all day long that I was caught.
The lady I was with kept telling me this lady was seen, this friend was seen in the square and I kept absolutely, I was petrified that…I was sure that my mother was caught. I spent the whole day worrying about it and at the end of the day I was waiting for my mother, if she had survived or not. She came, and then she told me her story.
She said that the farmer that she paid in advance to keep her got scared in the middle of the day and threw her out with my sister. Just threw her out into an empty field. Now that was a completely empty field with one bush somewhere in the corner. And she said she crouched with my sister in this bush all day long and there were airplanes flying looking for stragglers and they were looking for people who were escaping and as some miracle, they did not see her.
And when she came back she was sure that I was caught. See we were both so traumatized by this whole experience and she said “Look, we are not going to separate again. Whatever happens to us, we’re going to go together from now on”. And that was when she, with some help from her friends, decided to try another tact and that was when they decided to buy papers from a priest and change our name and religion temporarily.
SUSAN SNYDER:
So they used, they bought papers, so you were on false papers?
HALINA PEABODY:
Yes, that is correct. They are at the museum.
SUSAN SNYDER:
What did she buy them with? At this point, what kind of material possessions did your mother have to be able to do this?
HALINA PEABODY:
I think her friends must have helped her. We had nothing.
SUSAN SNYDER:
Her friends? When you talk about her friends are you talking about her Jewish friends or her non-Jewish friends?
HALINA PEABODY:
Oh her Jewish friends. The people who came…who were still alive from Zaleszczyki, it was a very nice group of people and very good friends and people were helping each other.
SUSAN SNYDER:
So at this point, everybody scatters. Where did you go?
HALINA PEABODY:
Well, my mother chose Jaroslaw, I don’t know why, but it was sort of close on the way to Krakow. As I said I don’t know, maybe she wanted to be closer there. I don’t know why. Jaroslaw was already, there were no Jews in Jaroslaw. So she sat me down and she said, look you’ve got to understand that you are now, this is your new name and this is your new birth date, place and your new grandparents. Everything was new. Basic Catholic commandments and whatever, I was very young…
SUSAN SNYDER:
And you had a new name, right?
HALINA PEABODY:
I had a new name, yes and she would check that I remembered everything and that’s what she taught me. And some basic behavior you know for the church. She felt that my sister didn’t know at all because she was just too young. She was like two and a half, three years old. There was, you know…she didn’t know. So she stayed, she was just, Eva was the same name, she had no idea what was going on. And our friends put us together, we got a couple of suitcases of clothes, that’s all we had left, and packed us up and put us on the train to Jaroslaw.
SUSAN SNYDER:
Can you describe the experience that you had? You mentioned you were sitting next to a Volksdeutsche, somebody who was an ethnic German who had been living in Poland.
HALINA PEABODY:
Yeah, we got on the train and eventually some young man attached himself to us and started talking to my mother, chatting her up, asking about the children and finally he started asking her if there was Jewish blood in our family, if it was my father and pushed and pushed and pushed and finally my mother admitted that we were Jewish because she told me she just couldn’t withstand the pressure. For him it was a big catch because being a Volksdeutsche it was points for him if he caught some Jews. So that’s what we understood what was going to happen to us.
My mother said that he told her that he was going to take us to the Gestapo when we got to Jaroslaw and she understood that.
SUSAN SNYDER:
But your mother wanted him…
HALINA PEABODY:
My mother said she was going to make a deal with him she wanted to make a deal with him. And she gave him all the money she had and the receipts for the cases, she said she just wanted him to do one thing when we get to the Gestapo that he would have us shot all together so that she wouldn’t be parted from her children and she didn’t want her children to suffer. And he promised to do it.
SUSAN SNYDER:
But there’s some time that passed while you were still on the train. Your mother was anticipating he was going to turn you in as soon as you got to Jaroslaw. What was the tension like? What was your mother feeling and could you pick up on her emotions and desperation?
HALINA PEABODY:
Well she had given up, she just decided that the best thing would be not to have us separated and suffering and she would just end it. That was her idea and he was very sure to keep us in his eyesight. He was either with my sister or with me so obviously my mother couldn’t run. Not that she would have, but I think that was his idea I always say that he took care of us, but that was why he took care of us until we went to Jaroslaw.
It was four days and four nights on the train and we had to change and we were full of lice. I mean we were hungry and tired and exhausted by then, but you know, he stayed with us. And then as we got closer to Jaroslaw, as I said, during that trip I didn’t think much about anything.
SUSAN SNYDER:
Were you aware what was impending?
HALINA PEABODY:
Yes I was, but somehow I don’t remember thinking about it until we got to Jaroslaw and suddenly it occurred to me and it sort of shook me that when we got off, we were walking to the Gestapo and I started pulling at my mother and I said, “Mom, Mom I don’t want to die” and she said to him, “look, why don’t you let her go, she’s blond and green eyed and she doesn’t look Jewish, maybe she’ll survive” and I said, “No, No I want you to come too”.
So as we’re walking towards this Gestapo and she says to him, “Do you have children of your own?” and he said yes. So she says to him, “Why do you want this on your conscience? I’ve given you everything I had…” except for the coats, she kept the coats because we were cold.
So she said, “Why don’t you just let us go and try our luck?” and we walked a bit further and he thought about it and indeed he had everything we had, except for the points I guess he would have gotten, but he decided that suddenly he said, “Okay I’ll let you go” and he just kind of left us in the middle of the street and his last parting words were, “You don’t have a chance in Hell”. That’s what he said.
SUSAN SNYDER:
But your mother did she, I mean at the end of this scenario did she, I mean could you see the relief but the angst in her?
HALINA PEABODY:
Oh we were very very relieved, of course we were.
SUSAN SNYDER:
You told me that you and your mother were sort of on the same page. That your mother kept you well informed but didn’t burden you. Can you describe what that was like?
HALINA PEABODY:
Well it was just that relief. When you’re uptight so much that you’re just so scared and suddenly you get this relief and you get another chance at life.
SUSAN SNYDER:
So at this point you’re in Jaroslaw and you have no place to live. You have nothing. You have no game plan.
HALINA PEABODY:
We don’t know the city, we don’t know the town. We’re just walking in the main street there and so my mother, being my mother, always finds a way. So she saw a little café, so we walked in the café. It was very important to be off the streets because the Germans were looking for stragglers and it was always dangerous.
Now I have to say, we didn’t know if our papers were real or not. Could have been a complete…I still don’t know. So we didn’t want to have them examined if possible. So we didn’t want to be found on the street. So it was very important to find some place to live. So when we got into the café my mother started asking people there whether they knew of anybody who took lodgers and luckily again somebody got up and said, “Yes I know a lady who takes people in and I’ll be happy to walk you over, it’s not far from here”.
So he walked us over there and this nice old lady who was a washer woman with four strapping sons who were not happy to see us at all, but she said…she was a very good woman. I would say she was a real good Catholic. She saw a mother with two children, worn out and just really completely at the end of their tether. She said she was going to take us in. She took us in and what we got was a bed, that’s what you had. I mean you didn’t get apartments or rooms, you just got a bed. And that was sufficient, but we were in.
And my mother said to her that she doesn’t have any money that she’ll have to go to work the next day, whatever work she can find, and whatever she earns she’ll bring back to her and pay her for keeping us. And she did exactly that, she learned to do some housekeeping and she was very able to learn, especially in that kind of a situation. So she started working as a housekeeper somewhere. It was very meager and she worried all the time that we would be, some sign we might give…and she was always worried about us giving ourselves away.
We did not speak Yiddish, our accents were pure Polish because my mother went to Polish school, so that was to our advantage, but my sister had very curly hair and in Poland, the Polish girls have straight blond hair. My hair was a little curly, but they put it in braids as you saw in that picture, so it was kind of straight and as I said, I look much more Polish than anything else. But my sister’s was just curly, like an afro so she was so worried about that, that she had her head shaved a couple of times, because she said it would make her hair thicker. That was the excuse she used anyways.
But as I said, she was very very worried about somebody pointing to us. The Poles were very good at recognizing Jews and very helpful to the Germans. So, all the time she was thinking ahead. At first she thought she would offer ourselves for work in Germany, because in Germany they don’t recognize Jews as quickly, Germans are not as quick to recognize Jews as the Poles. What happened was, they would have taken me and her, but my sister was too young, so they turned us down and my mother was trying to have her adopted and thank God nobody was willing to do that. So that fell through.
In the meantime, I was going to school with the Polish kids for two hours a day. One hour was religion and one hour was general studies. Of course I was far ahead because I could read and write which was very helpful. I learned the Catechism from A to Z, if anybody’s Catholic they know what that means. So, the priest liked me very much, they of course didn’t know who I was, but I did very well with him and he was a very nice priest.
SUSAN SNYDER:
Can I ask you a question about that?
HALINA PEABODY:
Yes.
SUSAN SNYDER:
Are you sure that the priest didn’t have an idea that you were Jewish?
HALINA PEABODY:
Absolutely.
SUSAN SNYDER:
What about the woman that saved you?
HALINA PEABODY:
Absolutely not. My mother thought that she suspected maybe my father was Jewish.
SUSAN SNYDER:
But she did not suspect that…?
HALINA PEABODY:
Absolutely not at all. No she did not. They would have been too afraid.
SUSAN SNYDER:
Talk a little bit about her four sons. Because you mentioned one of them was very suspicious.
HALINA PEABODY:
Yes one of them was very suspicious and he also worked for the Germans and he use to come home and talk about pulling gold teeth out of Jewish dead and things like that for us to hear. But he was suspicious, but she wasn’t going to listen. She was very intent on saving my soul. My mother was too old, my sister was too young, but I was the one she worked on. She sent me for special classes.
I went to the communion and she was really a very good person and she tried, according to what she believed in, to save me. And I appreciated that, more so today than maybe then. Also, my mother in her wisdom asked me to go help another Volksdeutsche that was across the street because I knew how to darn socks, which was one of the things she taught me and help in the kitchen and that was helpful also to be useful. They always wanted to be…
Now the son, the other, the youngest son, was the one that was the trouble. He killed pigs for a living and that was a death sentence no matter who he was. Poles were not allowed to do that. So we were always worried that the Germans would raid the house because they were always looking for him. So those were the two that I knew pretty well.
SUSAN SNYDER:
Do you remember, can you recall, what it was like your day-to-day? How you felt? What you did? Were you worried? Did you have a sense a little sense of relief after leaving Zaleszczyki and then Touste? Fleeing the Russians, fleeing the Germans.
HALINA PEABODY:
It was actually, I lived in fear always thinking ahead of where I could give myself away. I mean, we attended church every Sunday and I was always worried that I would say something. I once caught myself crossing myself with my left hand instead my right had and I immediately looked around and thought, Oh God somebody’s going to give me away. That was every minute, you had to kind of watch yourself not to do anything, not to say anything and my mother and I were the only ones who knew who we were. So we had to be careful. My sister had an easier time since she didn’t know she was Jewish.
We attended church every Sunday, I enjoyed that experience very much it was a sort of relief because that was one day when we were not so afraid. We were in the Mass, there was the incense and the priest…
SUSAN SNYDER:
You felt very comfortable?
HALINA PEABODY:
I felt very comfortable. My biggest problem was going to Confession. I had nobody to ask, “What do I say? What do I do?” But as I said they kind of let me through because I was a child and I made up a few lying things and whatever and the few “Hail Mary’s” they taught me and that was suppose to be okay. But I was always afraid because I always said the same thing I didn’t know what to tell the priest.
So those are the little things that were there all the time. We did have, I had some friends. We had a very good job because the Polish farmers had to bring a certain amount of potatoes or vegetables, it was called the contingent and once they got weighed in, they would let us pinch, you know, run along behind their carts and we could take a little bit because we were quite hungry. We didn’t have enough food. So we would run and we would catch and we would sit on the back of the carts and grab whatever we could. So we would steal and that was a very important job and as I said the Sunday was sort of a relief.
My hostess, the lady who kept us also taught me how to wash floors and she always told me that I won’t be able to know how to cut bread until I know how to earn it. She was a good lady, she was very very nice, but I’ve always underlined that nobody knew who we were. Nobody.
SUSAN SNYDER:
And your mother what did she do? She found a job.
HALINA PEABODY:
Yes. She, again, after we were turned down for Germany, she decided she was going to do this hiding in plain sight. She thought if she worked for the Germans it would be better because she’d have something like I have with the Museum, an ID, an ID card. Again, with trepidation she applied to the German military camp. Again, they told her they’re going to check the papers and that has to take some time. So we lived in constant fear that those papers were not real and we waited for either they’re going to kill us or they’re going to give her the job.
And after a few weeks indeed the permit came through and that’s why she did get that job. And that was a job that gave her a little bit of assurance because if she was caught in the street or anything, if she could show the ID that would probably have taken care of, they wouldn’t have kept her and they wouldn’t have taken her to the station.
And it became very useful because at one point the SS actually did raid the house in the middle of the night and they were looking for the youngest son who was killing pigs and what they did was they raided the house. They took everybody into the station and they checked them out and if you were working they would send you back.
In our case, we were always very afraid we didn’t want to go through that and sure enough they checked and my mother showed the Ausweiss and they said no you stay. We were the only ones in the household of some people that they left, the others were checked out and sent back. So they didn’t really suffer much. For us, it would have been a little more scary.
SUSAN SNYDER:
There’s also this question of the fact that you were women and not men. And it was easier to hide women who were Jews than men because Jewish men were circumcised. So tell me about the liberation and what happened because it wasn’t really a sense of relief, something tragic happened.
HALINA PEABODY:
Well first of all, when we first got to Jaroslaw there was one communication from our friends. A letter came to tell us that my father had sent us letters through the Red Cross, that he was alive with his sister in Palestine. Now Palestine was what today is Israel.
In those days it was under the British mandate and that’s where my aunt and my cousins were. We didn’t know that part of the family very well because they went to Palestine in 1932 and so we just knew of their existence and it was just my father’s sister and her family. We had that knowledge and kept it very nicely because to us it was some hope that maybe one day we can get out.
SUSAN SNYDER:
You had something to live for.
HALINA PEABODY:
Yes exactly. And then one morning after she woke up and we woke up and I was standing by the window…we did not know what the status of the war was at all. We had no newspapers, no radios, so we didn’t know what was going on. But when we woke up that morning it was a complete silence, like a very loud silence because we were on a main road and not a car goes by, not a human being, just completely silent. And as I’m standing there my mother is still thinking should I go to work or not?
We don’t know what’s happening and suddenly there’s a tremendous bang and a bomb fell on our little house. It must have split on top because the roof fell in. I started screaming because my hand was wounded. My mother grabbed me and we walked into the street. My hand was bleeding. She walked us to hospital, a nearby hospital and they patched me up they said that they might have to amputate my hand because there was no penicillin in those days so they thought it was just too much dirt in the wound. It was a very big open wound.
My mother and my sister stayed with us that day. The next day she went back and it turned out that the lady who kept us had died in the kitchen. The roof fell on her. And so she died and there was no where really for her to go back, but the neighbor took her in. That house that you saw was three different abodes sort of thing. Can’t say apartments, but there were three families living. Ours was the middle one and the lady on the right took us in. She had only one son. So my mother stayed there and I stayed in the hospital.
And the Russians walked in and they had the artillery all outside the hospital and they were shooting all the time and there was a lot of noise at night.
SUSAN SNYDER:
Well because at this point there’s still a war going on. It’s still July of 1944.
HALINA PEABODY:
Right. And the Germans disappeared, the absconded. So I say to my mother, “well now I can say who I am. Finally I can say my name.”
SUSAN SNYDER:
That you’re Jewish.
HALINA PEABODY:
Well I just wanted to give my proper name. You know, the name I was going under was Alina Litynska and I’m Halina Peabody well not…Halina Litman. And my mother said unfortunately you can’t yet.
SUSAN SNYDER:
Why? How did she know?
HALINA PEABODY:
How did she know? She went back and she knew because it was right across the street there was some Jewish people who came out of hiding and there was a pogrom and the Poles killed them. And she said, “I’m afraid we have to keep the pretense a little longer”, and after that the lady that took her in, the neighbor, her son came to her and he said, “I’m sorry about one thing, that Hitler didn’t finish his job”. So I was very very hurt about that. I was very annoyed because you know finally I thought I would have to stop hiding and I couldn’t. So it was very very frustrating. Anyway, that was part of it
SUSAN SNYDER:
You were able to reunite with your father. Can you describe briefly how you did that?
HALINA PEABODY:
Yes my mother started knitting again for a living because that’s all she could do, and started giving announcements in the paper because she didn’t even know it was Haifa or Tel Aviv that my aunt lived in and luckily again the lady at the radio station happened to know my father personally. When she saw the request for Olga, Halina and Eva and the father dentist she immediately contacted him and he started corresponding.
It took a year, about a year, before we actually had a possibility to move. But he eventually sent my cousin from Palestine because my cousin was in the British army. At that time as I said, it was a British mandate.
Now in the meantime, my mother unfortunately found a lump on her breast and I was told by the doctor that she didn’t want to see us orphaned that she should have an operation and to urge her to do it. She did. So I was with the hand, she was with that.
Anyway, by the time my cousin arrived, he brought some money and he was going to put us in touch with the Jewish agency to try and get us out. My sister of course didn’t know she was Jewish and when she saw my cousin, who didn’t look very Jewish but I guess she recognize as I said, the Poles knew how to do that, she looked at him and she said, “Ari, you’re a nice man, but you’re Jewish”. So we had some work to do with her.
SUSAN SNYDER:
So it wasn’t...you’re post-liberation experience wasn’t really anything but a relief because you had to deal with your hand and your mother’s illness…
HALINA PEABODY:
And my sister who didn’t know who she was.
SUSAN SNYDER:
And you were also for awhile you…the three of you were separated from your father still
HALINA PEABODY:
Oh of course.
SUSAN SNYDER:
And where was your father?
HALINA PEABODY:
Well it turned out that my father came out of Russia with a Polish army. There was an agreement between Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin to let out some of the prisoners that he had in the Gulag to fight for their side because they needed every man to fight the Germans, they needed to defeat Hitler. So they were willing to do that. And my father, my aunt and uncle and cousin were all part of this Polish army that came out. And they came out through Tehran and then onto Palestine and my father was actually stationed in Egypt with his unit…
SUSAN SNYDER:
Which, it was Anders’ army?
HALINA PEABODY:
It was General Anders was the General of this army and this was part of the British army. So later on we had the advantage of having the choice to either going to Palestine or to England. Of course we chose England so that’s where we ended up.
SUSAN SNYDER:
How was it reuniting with your father?
HALINA PEABODY:
It was difficult. He…first of all we didn’t get immediately to reunite with him completely because he came he met with us, he spent a week with us but he had to go back to his unit. So we got to England on our own and we spent almost a year there in the officers camp there near Liverpool before he came. And only then he came back and he got demobbed which means he was released from the army. It took awhile, he was still very much involved with his unit and after we all moved to London, everybody wanted to come to London, most of us ended up in London, and bought a house and just started to get our roots in because all we wanted was a place of our own. You know we had been homeless for so long.
When we came out of…when my father met us we had two rucksacks with us, which he threw into the fire and that was it that’s how we came out with nothing.
SUSAN SNYDER:
And when you were establishing a new life in London, in England did you talk about your experiences with people? Did you tell your father about your experiences?
HALINA PEABODY:
I did not.
SUSAN SNYDER:
Did he ask you?
HALINA PEABODY:
He might have talked to my Mother, I don’t think so. I only heard from my sister, that was something that she shared with me, that after the Russians moved in the second time that she was caught, some kids caught her…cause when she found out she was Jewish she realized what it was about, that some kids asked her, “Now you can tell us you’re Jewish right?” and she looked at them and said, “What? Look at me do I have horns? Do I have tail?” So it took some work on her, you know, to realize that that’s not what we were like.
SUSAN SNYDER:
Well Halina, you have a really very interesting story and I have many questions, but I’m actually going to open it up to the audience for questions if they have any questions of Halina.
Yes? Let me just repeat the question. The question was, did Halina wonder why other countries didn’t come to the aid of the Jews?
HALINA PEABODY:
I don’t think we even thought about it. We had no…some people had relatives in the United States and we had nowhere to go. We didn’t even try. We didn’t think of that. I just thought why are the people, the neighbors attacking us? Why were we not just accepted and liked for who we were? And why are they killing me because I was Jewish? And I looked at myself and the others and what am I different? Why am I being attacked? Why do I have to be scared and why do I have to continue pretending that I wasn’t who I was?
SUSAN SNYDER:
Yes all the way in back. Do you know what happened to your Mother’s friends who gave you money to get on the train?
HALINA PEABODY:
None of them survived I’m afraid.
SUSAN SNYDER:
Yes? Did you physically see the Geramns taking Jews away, deporting them during the actions?
HALINA PEABODY:
What I did see, I was standing in my house and I saw across the street they were shaving a Jewish religious guy and they were yelling and screaming and shaving his beard off. And I remember my Mother pulling me away. And the next thing I saw, one of our neighbors bought somebody out of a concentration camp.
The Germans allowed you to do that because that was one way of getting more money out of us, because obviously each one tried to hide a little bit. And they brought him out and he looked like…I can’t tell you, terrible and I remember my Mother saying, “Well, they paid for him, they got him out and the next thing, they’ll take him right back”. I did not see any other type of thing, but those two experiences are very much in my mind.
SUSAN SNYDER:
I have a question for you actually. Do you know if your mother paid the woman in Jaroslaw to keep you or did she do it without…I mean other than the money that she earned while she was in Jaroslaw? Did she initially come to this woman and offer possessions at all?
HALINA PEABODY:
We didn’t have anything. I mean we just had what we had on.
SUSAN SNYDER:
And did the woman actually did she at any time ask for more than she was able to get?
HALINA PEABODY:
No. My Mother gave her everything that she was earning. That’s all we had, we arrived with nothing. I mean the man took everything. So you know, as I said, she was a good woman. She just wanted to save us.
SUSAN SNYDER:
So she really had her true, it was her true actions?
HALINA PEABODY:
Yes, absolutely. Yes. Yes.
SUSAN SNYDER:
Any other questions? Yes? When you finally got to England, how was it adjusting?
HALINA PEABODY:
It was very hard, because I was kind of taken aback. I suddenly…I knew how to read and write but when I looked at the English [language] it didn’t make any sense to me. My Mother refused to let me go…there was a Polish school, but she refused. She said, “You’re now in England, you have to learn English”. So I got dropped into an English school and within quite a short time I learned and I learned most of my English in school. I think she was very right as usual and it took me a long time.
What did help me was that I took up the game of table tennis and that might not sound as much and I really wanted to play tennis but the conditions were such that I couldn’t, but the tables were in the college and then where we bought the house there was a club Maccabi, which is a Jewish youth club which also had a table and very active table tennis teams. And so I played every night and the weekend and that gave me a chance to be with young people without having to date them. I was so uncomfortable at that time this was just an outlet for me, a wonderful outlet. Also to keep warm because it was very cold in England and you didn’t have much heating.
So it served a lot of purposes for me and in the end I ended up getting chosen to represent England for the Maccabiah games in Israel, which are every four years for Jewish youth from all over the world like the Olympics, in Israel they have the Maccabiah games. That was in 1953 that I got chosen and I had the first glimpse of Israel and that’s where really my life had changed completely because I realized that there’s a place that belongs to us and that we have some place to run to in case there’s problems again. And that’s why it’s so important to me.
SUSAN SNYDER:
Well I wanted to thank you. Unfortunately we have no more time for questions, but I want to encourage you if you have questions please come up after the program. But Halina I wanted you to also have the last word in this case, the program.
HALINA PEABODY:
Yes, yes I always think it’s very important that I tell my story. I used to think it wasn’t that important because I wasn’t in a concentration camp, but I’ve realized that it is important because every piece is…it’s like a quilt that you need to add to the whole story of what happened. And of course I feel that if I tell you my story that you will remember first of all that it did happen and if any deniers tell you it didn’t happen then you can say that I talked to an eye-witness.
And also that it would make you think about how we can work together for future tragedies. You know there are things going on in Darfur and there were in Rwanda. All the time the world is full of people who are just cruel and we are the bystanders. Usually we don’t stand up and we are the majority. So we need…each one of us has to work either with a group or by yourself and help others and each other and to bear that in mind. And if you need any help…the United States Holocaust Museum has all the information and you can access it so easily.
There’s just so much that you can learn if you want to do any further research. But the main thing is that you remember to help each other and to work for a better world. We call it Tikkun Olam meaning repairing the world. There’s lots to be repaired and I hope that you will all become our witnesses and help for the future generations.
