Sidebar: A woman, a mission, a movie

They called her "the angel" but she was not your typical heavenly messenger — she was "audacious, liked to drink, chewed tobacco, shouted a lot."

Twenty years ago, she was honored at Yad Vashem as a Righteous Gentile, a Polish woman who saved Jewish lives but also sheltered a German soldier during the war. "I'll help any people — even if they're Germans," she once said, "as long as they're good people."

Elizabeth native Judy Maltz, 45, feels a special connection to "the angel" because among the 15 Jews Francisca Halamajowa hid from the Nazis in her hayloft over the pigsty were Maltz's grandfather, Moshe Maltz; her father, Chaim (Herb), a 39-year resident of Elizabeth who was seven when he went into hiding in 1943; and other family members. "One hundred people owe their life to her," Maltz told NJ Jewish News in a phone interview, including the descendants of the people she saved.

"I always wanted to do something that would immortalize her, spread the word about her, this very compassionate woman," Maltz said. So Maltz — a journalist and lecturer in journalism at the College of Communications at Penn State University — is doing just that by making a documentary she calls On the Side of Angels.

This month, Maltz, accompanied by members of the Maltz and Halamajowa families, and her fellow filmmakers Barbara Bird and Richie Sherman, will travel to Sokal, a small Ukrainian town that was once part of prewar Poland before the borders shifted. They will be looking for the small farmhouse where "the angel" lived most of her life.

They will be guided in their search by an unusual relic, the diary her grandfather kept while he was hidden — "not a memoir but an account in real time," Maltz said. The diary — the original is in the Yad Vashem archives — "is full of great detail about the Jews of Sokal and fabulous descriptions," said Maltz. She is hoping that this painstakingly compiled document will lead them to Halamajowa's house.

Members of the Maltz family in Austria after the war.

"We have the exact address," Maltz said. "We know where the train station and the post office were, the Jewish ghetto. I think we'll be able to find it.

"There are not many diaries from this period — my grandfather's diary is unique. It documents his coming out of hiding and seeing the ghost town after the war." On the eve of World War II, Maltz said, 6,000 Jews lived in Sokal, half the total population. When the war was over, 30 Sokal Jews remained; half of them owed their lives to Francisca Halamajowa.

"I always knew that there was a very fabulous story sitting on my lap and that was the story of my family," Maltz said, adding that that's only a part of the story. "Part of my quest in this film is to find out why Francisca did it. I have conversations with her from the diary — how she cooked for them and got rid of their wastes. And how she got fed up, tried to get rid of them — she was human, after all — and then reneged. She kept them."

Francisca Halamajowa and her daughter Hela: They hid members of the Maltz family and other Jews for 20 months. Photos from On the Side of Angels

In the end, Halamajowa and her daughter sheltered the Jews in the hayloft for 20 months. (And when the war ended, they learned that three other Jews had survived by hiding under the floorboards in Halamajowa's kitchen.)

The documentary is about two families — the rescued and the righteous. "Most of us children of survivors have known our story," Maltz said. "With children of rescuers, it is completely different. Francisca's grandchildren didn't find out about their grandmother until they were in their 20s and got an invitation to participate in a ceremony at Yad Vashem. In Poland after the war, it was very dangerous if a story like this became known. People thought if you saved Jews, you must have money stashed away."

After the war, Maltz's family in America sent food and other necessities to Halamajowa but she never told her family where the huge boxes came from. "They could have known the story and been proud of it" all these years, Maltz said. "But they do remember her — standing with her cane shouting at people" — the angel with rough edges.

Their memories will be included in the documentary. Three of Halamajowa's grandchildren immigrated to Connecticut, where interviews with them and some of the great-grandchildren have already been filmed. They were a traditionally religious Catholic family, Maltz said, hardworking immigrants who emphasized education for their children.

Bird, who is not Jewish, told NJJN that she and the other filmmakers feel that the movie will tell "not just a Jewish story. It gets down to choices — Moshe choosing to keep a diary, Halamajowa's choice to risk her own life and that of her family to save others."

The film will also be about a legacy and another kind of choice — what the families and descendants of survivors and rescuers choose to do with that legacy.

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A woman, a mission, a movie

Judy Maltz is making On the Side of Angels to
immortalize the woman who saved her father.

AS JUDY MALTZ begins the final stage of making On the Side of Angels, there's a feeling of inevitability surrounding the project, an understanding that circumstances and history have made this the right moment to bring the whole story to life on film.

The path to this moment began in Maltz's childhood. Raised in Elizabeth, she belonged to the Jewish Educational Center, an Orthodox synagogue, where her family continues to be active. Her father has served on the JEC board for the last 10 years and was a board member of the local federation from 2000 to 2006. Although her father never spoke to her about his wartime experiences — "I think he was too traumatized by his childhood memories," Maltz has said — she spent a great deal of time with her grandparents, and they talked to her about the Holocaust — "maybe telling me — I was just a child — too much." Her grandfather died at 90 in 1992, her grandmother, who also survived, in 1993.

In 1983, after graduating from Barnard College in New York City, Maltz moved to Israel, where she was chief economic correspondent in Jerusalem for Ha'aretz, and one of the founding editors of the Ha'aretz English edition. She also worked as a reporter for the Jerusalem Post and Reuters and has written extensively for other British, American, and Israeli newspapers.

She returned to the United States in 2004 when her husband, Amit Schejter, was offered a teaching post at Penn State University in University Park. She is sure that "if I hadn't been here, I couldn't have made this movie. I found two filmmakers on the floor above me and I was able to get them interested enough to collaborate" on the documentary: Barbara Bird, an associate professor of film at Penn State, and Richie Sherman, a professional cinematographer. (The film is a sponsored project of the university.)

Another On the Side of Angels crew member will be Schejter, a professor at the College of Communications, who, said Maltz, has been "training as a sound man so that he can work in this capacity on our film shoot in Ukraine."

While "the angel" herself is gone — she died in 1960 — five of the Jews whom Halamajowa saved are still alive; three, including her father, will travel to Sokal with Maltz, along with two of Halamajowa's grandchildren. Maltz's 100-year-old aunt in Monsey, NY, "who has vivid recollections of the years of hiding," can't make the trip but has been interviewed — in Yiddish with her son translating.

Maltz said she hopes to enter the documentary, scheduled for completion in the fall of 2008, in film festivals and to develop accompanying materials for educational use. Maltz's son Matan, 13, the oldest of her four children, will go to Europe with the group. "The trip is part of his bar mitzva present," she said. "What else could we do for our son that would be as meaningful at this time in his life?"

— JUDY WILSON