Bank of Portraits / Tkachuk Vasyl, Marfa and Khrystyna, Zatvornytska (Tkachuk) Hanna

Tkachuk Vasyl, Marfa and Khrystyna, Zatvornytska (Tkachuk) Hanna

Vasyl Tkachuk lived with his wife Marfa and younger daughter Khrystyna in the village of Lukanivka in Odesa (current Mykolaiv region). The region was occupied throughout August 1941. During this period, the first shootings of Jews were also recorded.

In the fall of 1941, a Jewish boy appeared in the yard of the Tkachuk family. The nine-year-old boy was exhausted and hungry. Marfa immediately took the little one home, warmed him, and fed him. He called himself Yurii Mohylevskyi; he said that he got lost when he was walking with his parents and relatives in a long line of people. For some time he wandered through the fields in the hope that his father and mother would find him.

At first, Vasyl and Marfa hid their ward in a storeroom or in a barn with livestock. However, when Yura fell ill with typhus, we had to take him home. The boy endured the disease very hard, but his mistress got him out. When rumors spread through the village that a Jewish child lived in the Tkachuk family, they moved Yura to their eldest daughter, Hanna Zatvornytska, who lived separately with her husband. Later he returned to Vasyl and Marfa. At that time, the couple was already hiding Olha Kreichman and her son Misha, as well as sisters Roza and Raiia Shmilyuk

Yura remained with the Tkachuk family even after the occupation troops were expelled from the region in March 1944. Later, it was found out that his parents died in 1941, and their house in Pervomaisk was destroyed.

In the 1990s, Yurii Mohylevskyi emigrated to Israel. All the time, he maintained parental relationships with his rescuers, who became a real family for him.

In 1994, Yad Vashem recognized Vasyl and Marfa Tkachuk and their daughters Khrystyna Tkachuk and Hanna Zatvornytska (Tkachuk) as Righteous Among the Nations.

Svitlana Demchenko

Kyiv

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

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