Halina Sznajderman is one of the antagonists in the Polish crime thriller, Detective Forst. Małgorzata Hajewska-Krzysztofik plays the character in the Netflix series.
Halina Sznajderman heads the headquarters, a foundation that is essentially a historical society that maintains archives on Gorals and the Tatras.
She is a stern, abusive, and confident old lady with a lot of pull and resources.
She’s got enough of them to have Chief Edmund Osica on her payroll and get him to suspend a detective from the case he’s leading.
As the story of Detective Forst moves forward, light is shed upon her past and her present objectives.
The one-eyed devil
An organized group of collaborators, all former Nazis, ran their operations of torment and abuse in secret. They would catch and detain people and later hang them by ropes.
That’s what became of the parents. Their daughters would soon go missing, vanquishing all of a sudden, never to return.
All except one went missing and were never seen again. They were all victims of the collaborators’ inhumane depravity.
They ran a top-secret brothel in the Tatra Mountains, where trafficked girls would be sent to.
There, they were subjected to the depravity of the wealthy degenerates, ultimately meeting their ends there.
One of these victims, nine months pregnant, came back. She came to Zakopane and gave birth to a girl.
She would not be paid much heed by the locals, as she was an unwed mother mostly wandering through the streets with a baby, mumbling about a one-eyed devil.
That one-eyed devil was Leon Lowotarski, the head of the collaborators, and also the one to outlive them all, still alive in Slovakia.
He lives in a technologically superior villa, which is still the same brothel for the depraved rich as it used to be.
A saga of vengeance
Years later, she would die. The daughter will grow up to be Halina Sznajderman, a headstrong woman who was also embittered and abusive as the director of an orphanage.
Halina would be consumed with her intense desire for revenge against those who made her mother into what she was before her death.
She ran the orphanage where Iwo Elijah and Wiktor were two sworn brothers with an unbreakable bond.
However, Iwo always ended up taking the blame for any wrongdoing.
One day, when Wiktor stole her necklace from her office, Halina caught him, but Iwo took the blame and got severely punished for it.
Halina would get Iwo subjected to extreme abuse and mold him into a brainwashed puppet of hers.
She would use it to exact her revenge on all the collaborators and their descendants.
Iwo Elijah kills him, as he kills many other descendants of the collaborators.
Before he goes on to exact his own revenge against Wiktor Forst, he learns from Lowotarski that Halina is his daughter.
After Halina reveals to Wiktor that Iwo is the serial killer he’s been investigating to find, Iwo kills her, since she’s the daughter of Leon.
Also Read: Detective Forst summary and ending explained