Halina Szymanska was a 22-year-old nurse in Krakow when a desperate Jewish mother arrived at her door in the winter of 1942, bleeding and carrying an eight-month-old boy. The mother had been shot at, had crawled through sewers from the ghetto, and had no milk left.
Halina hid the baby — David — in the basement of a hospital. She told German inspectors he was her nephew, killed in the bombing. She raised him for three years, feeding him, singing him Polish lullabies, holding his hand through the sound of German boots overhead.
When Krakow was liberated in 1945, Halina learned David's mother had been deported to Auschwitz. A Jewish relief organization came to collect children and send them to Palestine. Halina packed David's belongings and handed him over. David screamed. He would not eat or speak for two weeks.
Three months later, the orphanage director returned David to Halina. He had not spoken since leaving. She took him home, and he spoke within the hour. David emigrated to Israel in 1951. Halina visited him twice in Jerusalem. When asked if she regretted not keeping him, she said: I could not have kept him. He deserved to know his people. But the hardest thing was not hiding him from the Germans. It was letting him go.