By Michelle Martin
STAFF WRITER

Marisia Szul Diaczok lives a happy life in London, Ontario. Married to her second husband, Michael, for 16 years, she travels frequently to Chicago to visit friends who are as dear to her as family.

For more than 50 years, her friends have invited her for every wedding, every bar mitzvah, holidays and just for fun. The weekend of Oct. 29, her friends invited her to be honored for what she did that brought them together, 58 years ago and a world away.

“I am not a hero,” Diaczok insists, sitting in Mania Birnberg’s Lincolnwood home. “No, I’m just a normal person. It was just a thing I had to do. Sometimes people tell me they don’t know what they would do, how they would decide. Sometimes, if you have to decide, it’s too late. You do it or not do it.”

But to her friends—the Jewish people she hid from the Nazis in her barn for two years during World War II—“hero” is the only way to describe her.

“She’s the most wonderful human being who ever walked this Earth. She saved my life, and I mean that literally,” said Frieda Weinberg of Chicago.

Weinberg joined her brother, Martin Schacter, and Mania Birnberg, who were also sheltered by Diaczok, at a fund-raiser in Diaczok’s honor Oct. 29. The event was sponsored by the Avenue of the Righteous and Chicago Friends of the Jewish Foundation for the Righteous. It raised money for the Interfaith Coalition to Honor Polish Rescuers, an organization that provides direct financial assistance to Polish Holocaust rescuers who now have difficulty making ends meet.

Weinberg was 8 years old when she and her mother, Golda, and her baby brother, Martin, escaped from the ghetto in what was then Zborow, Poland.

Weinberg’s father had already been killed; her family hid under haystacks during the day and begged for food at night. Then her brother got sick.

“That particular day, my brother, who was a baby, was burning up with fever,” Weinberg said. “My mother said we have to take our chances, and she approached Marisia’s family in a field. They asked, ‘Aren’t you Mrs. Schacter?’ afraid he would cry. How do you tell him to be quiet? We have no food, no candy to give him.

“There was not enough food, not enough clothes for them or us, especially for small children. That was the hardest thing.”

One day, Diaczok went to a mill that Mania’s parents had owned, because Mania thought there might be flour there. Instead of flour, Diaczok found the scene of a massacre.

“I got there, and I saw some people—dead,” she said. “And children dead. I saw terrible things. And I turned around and left. I didn’t tell Mania or the rest of them. Wartime is the worst thing. People don’t like each other for no reason.”

For nearly two years, Diaczok and her family struggled to survive, along with the people they hid. Golda, the young widow, became like a sister.

Then, just before the Russians pushed the Germans out of the area, she was arrested.

For three weeks, she was beaten and questioned, but did not give any information. To do so would have meant death for her, her mother and siblings and the people she was hiding.

Then the Germans left. Her jailer, a Pole, freed her at night and gave her directions to get home.

“I just ran with my bare feet. My feet were all blisters,” she said. “When I got back, our house was finished burning. I see the people coming back. I went to a neighbor’s house and asked about Golda and her family and Mania, and they were all right. They went to the last house in the village, and the woman there let them in.”

After the war, Diaczok and Schacter worked in the black market, buying and selling salt and yeast.

They ended up in a camp for displaced persons, where Diaczok relied on Schacter. “Whenever anybody asked who I was with, I said I was with Golda. Everybody knew Golda,” she said. “Then they started registering people to go to Canada, and Golda says I should go. I didn’t want to go to Canada. I wanted to go to America. Who knew anything about Canada? And I wanted to stay with Golda. But she said they were going to Israel. So I went to Canada.”

Diaczok lost track of the Schacters and Birnberg for a few years, but Golda Schacter found her after bringing her family to Chicago. They stayed in touch until Schacter died 14 years ago.

Before she died, Schacter brought Diaczok to Israel and had her named as one of the Righteous Among the Nations honored at Yad Vashem, the Israeli Holocaust memorial. Diaczok is also honored on the North Shore Avenue of the Righteous in Evanston under her first married name, Marisia Szul.

Diaczok often talks about old times with Birnberg, and she shares most of her story willingly.

But her life is about the present, not the past. Her mother came to live with her in Ontario until she passed away, and her sister also lives in London. She keeps in touch with her brother, who lives near where they grew up, in what is now Ukraine. She remains close to Birnberg, Weinberg and Martin Schacter.

“We have a happy life,” she said, while staying at Birnberg’s house. “I don’t complain. When I came to Canada, I had nothing. Now I have everything. … These people are my family. I come in here like it’s my own home. I don’t feel like I’m in a stranger’s house.”

When asked why she risked her life for Jewish people, she almost doesn’t seem to understand the question.

“We’re Catholic, but for us, there was no difference,” she said. “Any nationality, we’re people all the same. I was a small kid, then a grown girl. I went to the church and I prayed. I didn’t know what kind of church it was. We are all the same. … I did it, and people are alive, and that’s good.”

“I have heard her say that people shouldn’t kill people and you should save human beings. That’s how she put it,” Weinberg said. “But if I was in her shoes, would I have done what she did? I haven’t been able to come up with an honest answer.”