'Miracle child' is a Holocaust survivor

GLEN ROCK — Frances Malkin was 4 years old when her family tried to poison her while they took refuge among hay bales in a pig barn in occupied Poland.

Malkin wouldn't stop crying as her family hid from a grisly fate, and they worried she would reveal their location to Nazis trying to kill Jews.

As a last resort, they shoved a poison pill in her mouth.

These days, after decades of silence, Malkin shares her survival story with listeners in her adopted country, America.

She told her story Wednesday to adults and youth at Glen Rock High School, where the audience also got to gaze at letters, maps and black-and-white photos depicting the horrors of the previous century. The series of 10 posters showcased a Russian perspective on the Holocaust.

The traveling exhibition was developed by the Moscow-based Russian Research and Educational Holocaust Center. It spent two weeks at Glen Rock High School, which last year faced several instances of anti-Semitic graffiti.

“We’re trying to find historical truth and common ground,” said Igor Kotler, CEO of the Millburn-based Museum of Human Rights, Freedom and Tolerance, which has a partnership with the Russian Holocaust Center. “While presidents fight each other, people have to find common ground.”

But for Malkin, the unthinkable described in the exhibit was more than a weeknight history lesson. The photos on the posters paled in comparison with her words, which painted a picture of an extraordinary childhood marked by dire threats.

The invasion

Frances Malkin was born in 1938, in the eastern part of Poland that is now Ukraine. Her family owned a confectionery store. Life was normal.

Then, in 1939, Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin signed a non-aggression pact, the two countries invaded Poland and World War II began.

“Communists came in, and everything was taken away,” Malkin said. “You were not allowed to own property.”

Malkin was a small child, so she doesn’t remember much from when the Jewish community in Sokal was forced into a ghetto, “a few square miles surrounded by barbed wire.”

To help tell her story, she relies on her uncle’s diary — written in Yiddish and later translated into English and called “Years of Horror, Glimpse of Hope: The Diary of a Family in Hiding.”

Many of Sokal’s Jews were rounded up and put on trains just beyond the ghetto. If they survived the train ride, they were gassed at Bełżec, a Nazi camp.

Roughly half a million Jews died at Bełżec, which was among the deadliest camps and a major part of the “Final Solution.” Bełżec was an extermination camp, and with no chance for work, few who were deported there survived to give testimony.

Malkin’s family avoided the trains. But tragedy struck when all Jewish men ages 14 to 60, including her father, were ordered to report to the town square for labor assignments.

“He came in, he picked me up, he kissed me. We didn’t find out until two years later," she said.

“When the Jews arrived, a crowd of Ukrainians was waiting for them. They selected 400.

“They were shot.”

In hiding

Malkin’s uncles, longtime residents of the area who knew all their neighbors, often sneaked out of the ghetto at night in search of a family willing to hide them, she said. Otherwise, they would face death at Bełżec.

Hiding Jews was punishable by death.

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“Everybody said no,” Malkin said. “Everybody said no, except for one woman.”

Francisca Halamajowa had thrown out her husband, a Nazi. In 1942, she and her daughter agreed to shelter two families.

Inside Halamajowa’s pig barn, a ladder led to a trap door, which led to a hayloft. That hayloft became home to Malkin and a dozen others for the next 20 months.

Malkin, the youngest, promised she wouldn’t cry. Crying, of course, would lead to discovery — and certain death for her family and Halamajowa.

“And this I remember: When we left the ghetto, people were being rounded up,” she said. “There was mayhem.

“I started crying.”

Halamajowa began beating the pigs, so they cried, too, masking the unhappy toddler’s wails.

But when Malkin wouldn’t stop crying, threatening to reveal the hiding location, her family came to a terrible decision.

The only way to defeat the Germans was to survive, they reasoned. They would have to sacrifice Malkin to save themselves.

Her relatives brought poison with them. They gave Malkin a lethal dose.

“I kept pushing it out,” she said. “They pushed it in. I fell asleep.”

They planned to place Malkin’s body in a burlap sack and put it in the nearby Bug River. And unknown to the rest of the family, Malkin’s mother planned to jump into the river after her daughter and drown herself.

They never had to use the sack.

“She went to pick me up and felt the pulse,” Malkin said. “At that point, they decided I was the miracle child.”

Story continues below the video.

Halamajowa continued to care for her hidden charges, bringing them buckets of food and taking away their waste.

Halamajowa even threw parties for Germans so neither they nor her neighbors would suspect the truth.

When the Soviet army liberated Sokal in July 1944,  Malkin’s family realized they weren’t the only people Halamajowa hid. The matriarch had also saved a family of three who lived downstairs. Just one refugee, Malkin’s aunt, died in hiding.

“6,000 Jews lived in the town,” Malkin said. “Thirty survived.

“She saved 15 of them.”

Liberated

With Malkin’s father gone, her mother knew there was no life for them in Poland. So mother and daughter headed west to Austria, where they waited in displaced persons camps.

Her mother found an uncle in the U.S. willing to sponsor them. In 1949, at age 10 and with no English skills, Malkin moved to Newark. She graduated from high school, married and had a daughter.

Her mother never remarried. And for the next 60 years, they never talked about what happened.

“Until 10 years ago I was totally blocked of it,” Malkin said. “I never spoke to my mother. It wasn’t mentioned.”

For that, Malkin said, she’s sorry.

“Talk to your parents, grandparents,” she advised the group. “Learn their stories. Everyone has a story.”

Modern anti-Semitism

Glen Rock has a story, too. The town’s middle- and high-school campus was among the many New Jersey sites defaced last year with anti-Semitic symbols. In 2019, there were three separate swastika incidents at the school.

After the incidents, school leaders met with students to find out how they felt about the issues, said Kathleen Walter, chairwoman of the Glen Rock High School social studies department and Glen Rock borough historian.

They decided to pursue the Anti-Defamation League’s No Place for Hate campaign, a self-directed program for schools. Glen Rock schools will host a handful of activities to promote social justice and inclusion and involve students in discussions about identity and bias.

“It’s really student-oriented and town-oriented,” Walter said. “It’s really for the entire community.”

Walter said she’s doing everything in her power to preserve history, including bringing people such as Malkin to share testimony with students.

But today, the youngest Holocaust survivors are more than 70 years old.

“I’ve always brought in Holocaust survivors,” Walter said. “And at a certain point I realized I’m not going to be able to do that anymore.”

Through the student campaign, the school hopes to take a stand against the ideology that has triggered a spate of anti-Semitic incidents, several of them violent, in the region.

But Malkin notes a difference between what she experienced as a youth and what Jewish Americans now face. Here, she said, anti-Semitism is driven by certain groups of people, not governments.

“I can’t call America an anti-Semitic country,” she said.

People often ask her, she said, if talking about her family’s experiences is hard.

“It’s not a negative,” she said. “I’m here. Hitler’s dead.

“I’m here.”

The United Nations-designated International Holocaust Remembrance Day is Jan. 27, coinciding with the anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. This year marks the 75th anniversary.

Yom Hashoah, which marks the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, is April 21. It corresponds to the 27th day of the month of Nisan on the Hebrew calendar.

Alexis Shanes is a local reporter for NorthJersey.com. For unlimited access to the most important news from your local community, please subscribe or activate your digital account today.

Email: shanesa@northjersey.com Twitter: @alexisjshanes