Bank of Portraits / Pashkovskyi Kyrylo, Antonina and Ivan

Pashkovskyi Kyrylo, Antonina and Ivan

Kyrylo Pashkovskyi lived in the village with his wife Antonina and six children. Frankopil, which is near the city of Korets in Volyn (current Rivne region). The religious family attended the Seventh Day Adventist Church. During the Holocaust, the Pashkovskyi couple hid two Jewish girls.

On July 2, 1941, the Germans occupied Korets and its surroundings, and already on July 12, the first executions of Jews took place. In May 1942, a ghetto appeared in the city.

21-year-old Ryvka and 19-year-old Nehama appeared in the yard the Pashkovskyi family in the fall of 1942. Antonina came across them in the cowshed when she came to feed the cattle in the morning. She knew the Weinschelboim sisters and their mother Malka, in whose grocery store she often shopped before the war. The girls told about the tragic fate of their family: the Nazis shot their parents, brothers and sisters on May 21. On that day, 3,220 residents of the Koretskyi ghetto were exterminated. When his final liquidation began on September 25, the sisters were lucky to escape. They wandered through the woods for a long time and, exhausted, wandered hungry into the cowshed. Antonina hid the Jewish women in the hayloft, while her husband and his eldest son Ivan arranged a safe shelter for them. When rumors of searches spread through the village, the Pashkovskyi family, in order not to endanger their own children, secretly took the sisters to their relatives in a nearby village at night.

As soon as the threat passed, the girls returned – and remained with the Ukrainian family until the expulsion of the Germans in January 1944. Then the Weinschelboim sisters moved to the city of Korets to their home. At first, the Pashkovskyi family helped their wards with food and firewood for heating. Later, Ryvka got married and emigrated to Israel. Nehama remained to live in her hometown, where she died in the 1960s.

In 1994, Ryvka Etstein (Weinschelboim) visited Ukraine, searched for the Pashkovsky ifamily and restored lost connections

In 1998, Yad Vashem recognized Kyryl and Antonina Pashkovskyi and their son Ivan as Righteous Among the Nations.

Svitlana Demchenko

Kyiv

National museum of the History of Ukraine in the Second World War

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