Nosenko Ulyana

Ulyana Nosenko and her husband Ivan lived in the village of Basan, Zaporizhzhia region.

After the outbreak of the war, Ivan was recruited and served in the Black Sea Fleet. Ulyana remained with three babies: Maria, Nina and newborn Viktor.

In October 1941, the German troops occupied Basan.

Once in May 1942, Ulyana noticed the unfamiliar teenage girl in the village, who asked the bypassers whether they needed a babysitter or house assistant. She called herself Pasha. Seeing the exhausted, starving and freezing child, Ulyana invited her to her house.

“On that day I was grazing a cow when the neighbor children told me: “You mom adopted a girl”. I desperately wished to see her and I rushed home. Her clothes were worn after a long way. The shoes were torn. Some kind-hearted woman gave her sleeves from her jacket and Pasha made the cover for her feet with them…” From the memories of Nina Sydorovych (Nosenko)

Pasha did her best to please Ulyana, but it was obvious that she never worked in the village. She could not milk a cow, take care of cattle or burn the oven. In addition, Ulyana noticed that Pasha tried to avoid strangers. Therefore, she decided to ask the girl why she was so scared by the other people. In response, Pasha cried and told her secret: her real name was Pesia and she was the third child in the multi-children Jewish family of Khurin. In April 1942, her parents Mayor and Zinaida and three junior sisters aged 12 and 6 years and 2 months died in Stalino (current Donetsk). The occupiers threw them alive into the notorious Coal Mine No. 44-bis that was 310 meters deep, where several thousand local Jews died. Few days before this horrible tragedy, Pesia and her Ukrainian neighbor girl went to the village to exchange their personal belongings for food. The rumors of the murder of the Jews from Stalino reached Pesia when they were going to come back. On that day her hardships began. On the way some peasants fed her and let her spend a night at their homes, but nobody agreed to give her a permanent shelter. Ulyana cried, listening the girl’s story, and then, calming down, she promised Pesia to take care of her. On the same day she went to the village mayor asking to register Pasha as the village resident, telling that the girl was her Greek relative.

“Even we, children, knew nothing about Pasha’s nationality. Mom told us that since then Pasha was Paraska Mykhailivna Kharchenko. She was afraid so much that mom would not harbor her”. From the memories of Nina Sydorovych (Nosenko).

When Ulyana went to work at the collective farm, Pasha played with her children. However, once during bombardment, a shell exploded on the Nosenko’s yard. Ulyana’s middle daughter Maria died of wounds and the junior son Viktor died an hour later of fright. Coming back home, Ulyana saw a horrible scene: the Jewish girl Pasha and the 6-year-old Nina Nosenko were crying on the bodies of Maria and Viktor… The fate was cruel and soon Ulyana received another tragic notification: her husband Ivan was missing in actions at the front, for the last time his servicemates saw the soldier near Kerch.

Until 1946, when she turned 18, Pesia lived with Ulyana and worked as a milkmaid at the collective farm, as a poultry keeper and as a babysitter at the kindergarten. Shortly after that she came back to Stalino, where she found her elder brother Yakiv, who returned from the front.

Pasha never forgot her savior. Nevertheless, after short correspondence they lost connection for many years. Only in 2000, almost 55 years later, Pesia Liamina (Khurina) finally managed to meet Ulyana’s daughter Nina Sydorovych (Nosenko) in Lysychansk. The savior died in 1985.

Thanks to Pesia’s request, on January 23, 2022, Yad Vashem recognized Ulyana Nosenko as the Righteous Among the Nations.