Hrubnyk Semen, Teklia, Zinaida and Mykhailo

Semen and Teklia Hrubnyk lived in the village of Karavan in the Kharkiv region. During the German occupation of the region, they saved a Jew, Arkadii Mirkin, from persecution at the request of a priest who, before the church was closed by the Soviet authorities, had a parish in their village.

Arkadii was a young, talented violinist who worked at the Kharkiv Opera Theater before the war. After October 25, 1941, his life changed dramatically. Already in December, the occupation authorities relocated thousands of city Jews to the barracks of one of the tractor factories. Arkadii ended up there too. A few weeks later, his wife Zina, having bribed a guard, took the musician out of the ghetto and asked her father, priest Ivan Kamyshan, to help save her husband.

Semen Hrubnyk, responding to the request of Fr. Ivan, took Arkadii from the city of Kharkiv to the village of Karavan. Together with his wife Teklia, he arranged a shelter for the Jew in his home. They also hid Arkadii with their daughter-in-law Zinaida, who lived with her three children on a farm near the village. Her 15-year-old son Mykhailo tried to ask his peers on the street for information about possible raids or searches in order to protect his relatives.

In the spring of 1942, the Germans began granting priests permission to hold services in churches, so Ivan Kamyshan returned from the regional center to the village of Karavan and took his son-in-law under his care. Until February 1943, Arkadii lived in the church.

After the Nazis were expelled, he was mobilized into the Red Army. Only after the war the man learned that his parents and younger sister were Holocaust victims. In 1990, he emigrated with his family to Israel.

In 2002, Yad Vashem recognized Semen and Teklia Hrubnyk, as well as Zinaida Hrubnyk and her son Mykhailo, as Righteous Among the Nations.