Kindrat Kyrylo

Kyrylo Kindrat was born in 1920 in Ivano-Frankivsk region. The miserable life forced him to go to work already at the age of 15. However, even when he went to work, the boy felt a desire for knowledge (he only graduated from a four-year primary school in the village). He was hired to build roads for food, because after three years of that work there was an opportunity to acquire a speciality at state expense. But the training turned out to be short-lived - the Second World War began. The young man returned home.

In the summer of 1943, fate brought him together with his former teacher, Warsaw University professor Isaac Schlesinger, who managed to escape from the Lviv ghetto. The day before, his wife and two daughters were shot there. Kyrylo realized that by hiding a fugitive Jew, he was endangering not only his own life, but also lives of his entire family. But he could not do otherwise. At first, he hid Isaac in the barn and in the pit for vegetables in the garden, and then - thanks to the relative remoteness of his environment - and in the house. During the year, he lived secretly in the Kindrat family.

In July 1944, Kyrylo and Isaak moved to the town of Burshtyn and got a job in the education system. And in the late 1940s, Schlesinger moved to Poland, from there he emigrated to Israel. Over the years, the savior and the survivor corresponded.

In the 1970s, Kyrylo Kindrat came under a wave of repression by the Soviet state apparatus in the fight against the sixties. He was slandered, a devastating article was published in the All-Union newspaper "Komsomolskaya Pravda", he was fired from his job at the Rivne Pedagogical Institute, where he headed the department of pedagogy and psychology, and was deprived of his academic degree. The reason is "anti-patriotic behavior during the occupation", correspondence with Jews. Although there was no official order. And only with the declaration of Ukraine's independence was he given back his degree and reinstated at the Rivne Pedagogical Institute. Kyrylo Kindrat gave lectures on pedagogy to students until the last day of his 81-year-old life, was active in public work, and closely cooperated with the People's Movement of Ukraine.

In January 1993, he created the Rivne Regional Charity Association of Christian Saviors "Righteous Among the Nations" and began work to search throughout Ukraine for people who saved Jews during the Holocaust, risking their own lives.

In December 1993, Yad Vashem recognized Kyrylo Kindrat as the Righteous Among the Nations.