Halina Litman Yasharoff Peabody was born Halina Litman on December 12, 1932 to a liberal Jewish family in Kraków, Poland. Her father, Izaak Litman, was a dentist and her mother, Olga Schreiber, was a champion swimmer.
Halina and her parents and younger sister Ewa (born 1939) lived in Zaleszczyki, Poland (today, Zalishchyky, Ukraine), a resort town along the Dniester river. At the time, Zaleszczyki was on the border between Poland and Romania. The family was not religious and spoke Polish at home.
In September 1939, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union invaded Poland, splitting the country between themselves in accordance with the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Halina’s hometown of Zaleszczyki came under Soviet occupation. Fearing conscription into the Soviet army, Izaak crossed the open border into Romania. A short time later when he tried to return to his family, Soviet officials detained him, accusing him of espionage. Izaak was sentenced to 20 years hard labor and deported to Siberia. Soviet authorities evicted Halina and her mother and baby sister from their home. They were forced to move to the nearby small town of Tłuste. During this time, they lost contact with Izaak.
In 1941, Germany attacked the Soviet Union and occupied all of Poland. Halina and her mother and sister returned to Zaleszczyki. The Nazis and their allies and collaborators implemented cruel anti-Jewish policies, including confiscating valuables, forcing Jews to perform forced labor, and requiring all Jews to wear armbands with the Star of David.
Olga Litman walks down a snowy street with her two daughters, Halina and Eva. —US Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Halina Peabody.
Halina was about nine years old when the Nazis carried out their first Aktion (operation) against Jewish civilians in Zaleszczyki. Under the guise of needing to bind young trees with burlap for the winter, the Nazis took a group of Jewish men into the forest to an old military base outside the town. Upon arrival, they were ordered to strip down and were executed by firing squad at the edge of a pit. One young man was able to escape after a bullet missed his heart, only wounding him. He was able to dig himself out of the pit and return to town to report on what happened. The Jewish community, including Halina’s mother, scrambled to find hiding places, not knowing what to expect.
In September of 1942, Nazi authorities forced the remaining Jewish community in and around Zaleszczyki to Tłuste, which eventually became an open ghetto in December 1942. Open ghettos were not surrounded by walls and Jews could come and go a little more freely than in closed ghettos. Realizing the danger of their situation, Halina’s mother bought false documents from a Catholic priest that identified her and her daughters as Catholic. With the new documents, they boarded a train to Jarosław, a town further west in German-occupied Poland that the Nazis had declared “free of Jews.” A man on the train pressured Olga into admitting they were Jewish and threatened to hand them over to the Gestapo when they reached Jarosław. On the way to the Gestapo headquarters, Olga pleaded with the man to let them go. He took all their possessions but relented and let Halina, her mother and sister go.
Constantly fearing exposure, Olga, Halina, and Ewa lived as Catholics in Jarosław with a woman who took in boarders. Olga found a job in a Nazi military kitchen in order to obtain a German identification card, which offered greater protection.
Izaak managed to communicate through the International Red Cross that he had left the Soviet Union and was now safe with his sister in Mandatory Palestine (now Israel), then under British control. Izaak had joined the Polish Armed Forces (also called Anders’ Army), formed from Polish citizens in the Soviet Union. Anders’ Army eventually came under the command of the British military. As part of Anders’ Army, Izaak managed to evacuate along with Anders’ Army to the west through the Middle East.
Shortly before the Soviets liberated Halina's family in Jarosław, a bomb fell on the house where they were staying, killing their landlady and permanently injuring Halina’s hand. Soviet forces drove the Germans out of Jarosław in July 1944. After liberation, Olga placed radio announcements in hopes of finding Izaak. A friend of Izaak’s heard the announcement. The family eventually reunited and settled in London, England in 1946.
In the 1953 and 1957 Maccabiah Games in Israel, Halina represented England in table tennis. She immigrated to the United States in 1968 and today volunteers at the Museum.
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