Boychenko Fedir and Lidiya

This story happened in the late summer of 1941 in Mykolaiv region. Jews have lived there on the Black Sea lands since ancient times. They worked, built, gave birth to children, living next to Ukrainians, Tatars, and representatives of other nations.

In the terrible August 1941 to the village of Velyka Vradiyivka (now the town of Vradiyivka) expelled a large group of Jews who were sentenced to death without trial or investigation. Among the doomed were mostly children, women, old people. Dina Waisenberg went to death with her daughters, Shyfra and Lisa. Exposing herself to premature death,  she took the children out of the concentration camp and gave them to local teacher Vira Tsymbalyuk. She called girls Shura and Lena and gave them to childless Doroshenko and Boychenko families.

Lidiya Boychenko and her husband Fedir raised Lena as a daughter. They were always surprised when the girl, like an adult, anticipating any danger, could sit in the shelter for hours without moving. Lena was only four years old.

Dina Waisenberg, the girls' mother, escaped from the concentration camp but died in the horrific ghetto of Balta. Lena, meanwhile, grew up, her parents baptized her, and even officially adopted her.

The war, however, still lasted, but Mykolayiv region was already liberated from Nazis. The sisters were found by their father, Yosyp Waisenberg. He got Shura back. But Boychenko family  got so used to Lena, so they didn't give her to her father.

Only many years later, at the initiative of the youngest daughter of Fedir and Lidiya, two families - Boychenko and Waisenberg - resumed relations and forgot resentment. In 

the 1990s, Lena married a Jewish man and emigrated to the United States.

The heroic couple of Boychenko have already left this world. Fedir died in 1963, and Lidiya - in 1995. They were posthumously awarded the title of Righteous Among the Nations, on May 3, 2010.