No. 4 Street of Our Lady

This film tells the remarkable, yet little-known, story of Francisca Halamajowa, a Polish-Catholic woman who rescued 16 of her Jewish neighbors during the Holocaust, while cleverly passing herself off as a Nazi sympathizer. 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 Halamajowa. For close to two years, she hid her Jewish neighbors in her tiny home and cooked and cared for them, right under the noses of German troops camped on her property as well as 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 led to her execution. Even among the small minority of Poles who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust, Halamajowa's is by all accounts ...