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In June when people learned that the liquidation of the Lvov ghetto was going to take place, Gladys' mother asked Mr. Halicki to get out her brother, Yaakov, and his wife. Mr. Halicki agreed. At that point, Mr. Halicki was hiding Gladys, her mother, two aunts, the young woman Gladys met when she arrived, and her mother and brother, and there was no financial incentive for him to take an additional risk. The family had no more money to give him. Rather, he was taking this risk for moral reasons. He wanted to save them.
Mr. Halicki returned from Lvov with only Yaakov's wife, Tony. When asked what happened, he explained that Yaakov had said he still had to go into the ghetto to retrieve something and that Mr. Halicki should return for him in half an hour. When he came back to pick up Yaakov, he saw that he had already been loaded onto a German truck. Uncle Yaakov was taken to Janowska, a labor camp in Lvov, where he perished.
For eighteen months, this group of people lived together in hiding, in Mr. Halicki's workroom. Mr. Halicki was a locksmith, and with the money he had been given, he had fixed up the room so his neighbors could not detect that people were living there. There was one window in the room covered by a curtain. Even so, everyone in hiding walked around crouched as low as possible so they would not be seen. Not once did anyone dare to peek through this curtain to look at the blue sky or the stars at night. Even when alone in the house, they spoke to one another only in whispers.
When people came into the house, family members would creep up the ladder into the attic and stay there until the coast was clear. The only thing that might have given away their presence was Mr. Halicki's little dog. It had grown very attached to them, and when they climbed into the attic, the dog would sit and stare up at the ceiling, yearning for them to come down.
They had nothing to eat. Mr. Halicki had no money, and there was almost nothing left to sell. When they could, they embroidered pretty patterns on pieces of torn clothing for Mr. Halicki to sell in the market. Sometimes he would find them old sweaters. They would unravel them, wash the wool, and knit new sweaters. These, too, he sold to help buy a little food from time to time. With small snippets of leftover wool, they knitted a pair of gloves or a hat, also for sale. Despite all the efforts, they were still starving. During the last three months of the war, there was absolutely no food. Mr. Halicki would pick leaves from a nearby tree, and they would cook them in water to make a pretend soup. There were simply too many of them and virtually no money.
Mr. Halicki was not only committed this group of Jews but was also a member of the A.K., an underground organization that fought the Nazis. He made gun parts in his workshop and transported weapons from one part of the city to another.
And his neighbors were suspicious. One woman in particular kept track of the water he drew from the well, and one day she confronted him. "Why are you using so much water?" she asked.
"I have to keep clean," he answered. "My wife comes every Sunday, and she wants to see the house in perfect shape."
The wife did come to visit every Sunday after spending the week in town with their daughter. She was too frightened to stay in the same house with hidden Jews and the gun-running operation.
The neighbor across the street, an old man named Balitzki, was also suspicious. "Mr. Halicki," he would say, "why are you always carrying so much water? You must have Jews." To put these suspicions to rest, Mr. Halicki washed the dog in the yard and then took out every stick of furniture and washed it thoroughly. Of course, this activity was all a show. The water was for the Jews, who needed to bathe and drink as much as they could since they were not eating.
When the Russian bombs started falling, the camp in Lvov was liquidated. The Germans burned the Jewish bodies in an area called Piaski not far from Halicki's house, and Gladys and the others could smell the stench of burning bodies. They were terrified. Then the Hungarian soldiers came into the town, retreating with the front. When word got out that they were looking for places to live, everyone was sure they would come to Mr. Halicki's house. They were extremely frightened of this possibility. After all, how long could they go undetected in the attic? Fortunately, the Hungarians never came.
Then, in an ironic twist, the Ukrainian neighbor who had confronted Mr. Halicki about his water usage was afraid that the Russians would take her husband away when they took over the area. She begged Mr. Halicki to hide him. He did, putting the husband in the shed in the garden while the Jews remained in the house.
When the fighting ended not long afterward, Mr. Halicki had the Jews walk out two by two. He was still afraid that his neighbors would discover that he had hidden Jews. July 26, 1944 was their day of liberation.
from: "Darkness and Hope," pp. 166-168, by Sam Halpern, Shengold Publishers, Inc., New York, 1996
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