Rhode Island International Film Festival 2009

If your neighbors were being hunted down and came to your door begging for help, would you risk your life to save theirs? This film tells the remarkable, yet little-known, story of Francisca Halamajowa, a Polish-Catholic woman who hid 16 of her Jewish neighbors during the Holocaust, while cleverly passing herself off as a Nazi sympathizer.This film reflects on the painful moral dilemmas that acts of rescue and survival often entail and reveals how traumatic events of the past continue to play out years later.On the eve of World War II, more than 6,000 Jews lived in Sokal, a small town in Eastern Poland, now part of Ukraine. By the end of the war, only about 30 had survived, most of them rescued by Francisca Halamajowa. For close to two years, Halamajowa hid her Jewish acquaintances in her tiny home and cooked and cared for them, right under the noses of German troops camping on her property and hostile neighbors. Two families were hidden in the hayloft of her pigsty, and one family in a hole dug under her kitchen floor. In the final months of the war, she also provided shelter to a German soldier who had defected - an act that almost cost her her life. The film draws on excerpts from a diary kept by one of the survivors, Moshe Maltz, whose granddaughter is one of the filmmakers. It also incorporates testimonies from other Jews saved by Halamajowa, her descendants and formers neighbors, whose paths converge on a trip back to Sokal. Powerful location shots add another rich dimension to the story, providing the backdrop as the drama unfolds.