Litman family papers

Halina Litman (later Halina Yasharoff Peabody) was born on 12 December 1932 to a liberal Jewish family in Kraków, Poland. Her father, Ignacy Litman (Izak, b. 1902) was a dentist and her mother, Olga Schreiber (1909-1956), was a champion swimmer. They married in Kraków on 25 December 1928. After they married they moved to Zalishchyky, Poland (present-day Zalishchyky, Ukraine) near the Romanian border. Halina’s sister Eva was born in 1939.

After the Soviet Union invasion of Poland in fall 1939, Ignacy fled to Romania to avoid conscription into the Red Army, but the rest of his family remained in Zalishchyky. When he returned, he was arrested and accused of being a spy. He was then sent to a labor camp in Siberia. Olga, Halina, and Eva avoided arrest due to the intervention of Communist friends, but their house was confiscated. They moved to Tovste and remained there until 1941 when the Germans occupied the rest of Poland and moved back to Zalishchyky. Olga purchased false identification papers from a priest that allowed them to live as Catholics under the last name Lityński. After going back to Tovste, the family moved to Jarosław, Poland. While on the train there, a man befriended them and then deceived them into revealing they were Jewish. He told them he would turn them in to the Gestapo, but Olga was able to bribe him into letting them go. In Jarosław, Olga worked as a maid and in the kitchen in a German military camp. Shortly before liberation in 1944, a grenade was thrown at the house where they were staying. Halina lost her thumb and half of her little finger, and their landlady was killed.

Olga, Halina, and Eva were reunited with Ignacy after liberation, and learned that the joined the Polish Army under General Władysław Anders. He then went to Palestine to stay with his sister. The family immigrated to London, England by 1947. Halina represented England in the Maccabiah Games in Israel in 1953 and 1957. She immigrated to the United States in 1968. She is currently a volunteer at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.