Tkachuk Oleksii

Oleksii Tkachuk lived in the village with his wife Kseniia and two children in the village of Antonivka in Vinnytsia region. During the Holocaust, the family helped the Jewish Kuperman sisters by hiding them in their house. Before the war, the Kuperman family lived in the city of Bar. Father Petro worked as an accountant, mother Mariia was the head of a kindergarten, daughters Tania and Bronia studied at school.

The offensive of German troops on Vinnytsia began on July 6, 1941. By the end of the month, the region was completely occupied. The occupiers created 126 ghettos on its territory. Most of them existed in Kopaihorodskyi (14), Bershadskyi (11), Sharhorodskyi (10), Mohyliv-Podilskyi (7), Barskyi (6), Kryzhopilskyi (6) and Obodivskyi districts. Their prisoners were tens of thousands of people – both local Jews and forcibly expelled from Bessarabia and Bukovina. There are known cases when Ukrainians and those who were in mixed marriages ended up in the ghetto. In December 1941, three ghettos were organized in the city of Bar by order No. 21 of the local district administration. The Kuperman family got into one of them. The cold winter of 1941–1942 contributed to the emergence of epidemics of typhus and other diseases, and slaves died of hunger. However, the worst was ahead. The mass executions of the Jews of the Bar ghetto took place in two stages: August 18–19 and October 14–15, 1942. In two mass graves on the outskirts of the city: in the Kotov farm and in the village of Roshcha more than 6 thousand people are lying there, tortured, shot or buried alive.

The Kuperman family miraculously survived during the first mass execution. At the beginning of October, Petro learned that the next action was being prepared. He managed to contact a former colleague – Oleksii Tkachuk. Together they came up with a plan to escape from the ghetto. At first, Oleksii was supposed to take the girls, and later, after the escape of Petro and Mariia, help them cross into the Romanian occupation zone, where in the village Mariia's mother lived in the village of Djurin.

First, it was possible to take eight-year-old Bronia from the ghetto. Her parents ordered her to go with her uncle Oleksii, but the girl was afraid, she did not want to be separated from her family. Tkachuk treated her to seeds and took her to his family. The next day he also brought Tania. The sisters stayed in the house of their saviors for several days. According to the agreement, they were supposed to wait for their parents, but Petro and Mariia never appeared. Oleksii himself took the girls to their grandmother in village of Djurin. Beila Kleinerman took care of her granddaughters until the end of the occupation. She heard about the liquidation of the Bar ghetto on October 15, but she hoped that her daughter and son-in-law were saved. Only after the expulsion of the Nazis in March 1944, she found out about their death.

After the war, an aunt who lived in Odesa took the girls. There they returned to school. Only a few years later, the sisters came to the city of Bar, visited the places where Jews were shot, met with former neighbors, from whom they learned about their savior Oleksii Tkachuk. By that time, Oleksii had passed away, but his children well remembered the two Jewish sisters who lived with them.

According to the Kuperman sisters, in 2007 Yad Vashem recognized Oleksii Tkachuk as the Righteous Among the Nations.