In Search of a Shared Past in East Galicia, With Camera in Hand

By Judy Maltz

Sokal is a town that until two years ago existed for me only as an abstract, faraway place. It's the town where my father was born, and where my grandparents lived a rather good life until their world collapsed around them -- the place they meant when they spoke about the "old country."

It's one of those many little towns in the area known as East Galicia that every few years seemed to change hands. When my grandparents were coming of age, it was part of the Austro-Hungarian empire; between the two World Wars, it found itself on the edge of Poland's eastern border; during the Second World War, it was occupied by Nazi forces; and after the war, when the border moved west, it became Ukrainian territory.

But unless your family happens to have roots there -- as I've discovered -- most people have never heard of this part of the world.

For years, I'd try to imagine what it must have looked like. I'd picture the little farmhouses along the Bug River, the town square with its lively marketplace, the majestic synagogue where the Jews would gather each week for Shabbat prayers.

Judy Maltz entering Francisca Halamajowa's home at No. 4 Street of Our Lady for the first time; Maltz has made a documentary of her experiences.

Two summers ago, Sokal finally become a very real place for me. That was when I first set foot there to film a documentary about how my family had miraculously survived the Holocaust.

Without a Trace?

Before World War II, around 6,000 Jews lived in Sokal, where they made up almost half the population. By the end of the war, only 30 had survived.

The film, "No. 4 Street of Our Lady," tells the story of Francisca Halamajowa, a Polish-Catholic woman, who risked her life to save 15 of these Jews, including eight members of my own family.

She hid two families -- the Maltzes and the Kindlers -- in the hayloft of the pigsty behind her house, and another family, the Krams, in a hole dug under the kitchen floor. For almost two years, she fed and cared for her Jewish boarders, even while German forces had their tanks parked on her property and had moved into her tiny two-room house.

Fortunately, my grandfather, Moshe Maltz, had kept a diary during the war, which provided a detailed account of daily life in hiding. Using that as a guide, we were able to locate the house where the three Jewish families had been hidden, in addition to the site of the Jewish ghetto, the ruins of the 300-year-old synagogue and the old Beit Midrash. All other remnants of hundreds of years of bustling Jewish life in this town have vanished without a trace.

For me, one of the more gratifying -- and totally unanticipated -- outcomes of making this film has been discovering a global network of friends and acquaintances who share a Sokal connection. Many located me on cyberspace via the Web site for my film, which often became one of the first sites they'd hit when searching for information about Jewish life in Sokal (www.streetofourlady.org).

Such was the case with Alan Charak, of Sydney, Australia, whose father survived the war as a teenager working at the Sokal train station, where, it turned out, my great-uncle Shmelke had taken him under his wings. Such was the case with David Zugman, a hidden child from Sokal who lives in Florida today, and who shared with me in a telephone conversation his extraordinary tale of survival.

Others I reached out to after learning of their Sokal connection.

For example, there's Max Frankel, the former executive editor of The New York Times, whose mother was from Sokal, and who still has vivid recollections of the town from a trip he took there with her as a 6-year-old boy before fleeing to the United States.

And then there's Rabbi Burt Schumann, who, in 2006, was appointed Poland's first full-time Reform rabbi since the Holocaust. We figured out over e-mail that my grandfather's neighbor and dear friend, Shlomo Schumann, must have been Rabbi Schumann's great-uncle.

There have been dozen of others who've joined my network over the past three years. I cherish my correspondences with them and delight in every new connection made. I like to think of them as my ever-expanding Sokal family, or, to borrow a phrase from Yiddish, my landsmen.

And when I compare our extremely diverse life stories, I can't help but think how fascinating it is that we all trace our roots to this one little off-the-beaten-track shtetl.

"No. 4 Street of Our Lady" will be screened at the 2009 International Conference on Jewish Genealogy (www.philly2009.org) to be held next week in Philadelphia.