Fay Malkin

"I look at her picture now, and I think it was defiance" that drove her to risk her life, says Fay Malkin, speaking of Franciszka Halamajowa (pronounced "hah-lah-my-OH-wah"), the Polish Catholic whose barn in Ukraine sheltered Malkin and 13 other Jews during the Holocaust.  Malkin, who at the time was only four years old, almost didn't survive. After being secretly taken to a loft in Halamajowa's barn which sat over a malodorous pigsty, she could not stop crying. At wit's end, the adults who cared for her, including her mother and uncle, could not risk being detected so they decided to poison the girl.

Now a member of the board of Drew's Center for Holocaust/Genocide Study and the Holocaust Council of MetroWest, Malkin remembers desperately trying to spit out the poison, though she ingested enough to lose consciousness. A while later, she revived and the adults accepted her survival as a miracle.

In 2007, Malkin returned to Ukraine, and to the barn where she and her family spent 20 months. Her uncle's daughter, Judy Maltz, a journalist and professor at Penn State, felt compelled to make a documentary about her family's experience there, and she convinced Malkin to go back for the first time in six decades.

Maltz's 90-minute documentary, No. 4 Street of Our Lady, can be screened on Amazon.