Yom HaShoah Article Contender : Halina Peabody
Halina Litman Peabody was born on December 12, 1932 in Krakow, Poland. She was born into a liberal Jewish family.
She was the oldest of two girls. Halina lived in Zaleszczyki (today, Zalishchyky, Ukraine). When the war broke out in 1939, her father fled to Romania, leaving her mother, her and her sister, Eva (who was just a baby) behind.Halina’s mother bought false documents from a Catholic priest that identified her and her daughters as non-Jews. With the new documents, they boarded a train to Jarosław, a town further west in German-occupied Poland. 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 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.
They took residency with a woman who took in boarders. She began to live her life as a Catholic.
At age 12, a bomb fell on the house where she was staying at and it seriously injured her hand.
After the war, her whole family moved to England and she found table tennis and competed. She immigrated to the United States in 1968. She has two sons and two grandchildren.
