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At the beginning of 1946 I visited Yaruga. I met my Uncle Isaac. He had survived the occupation. Yaruga was the only place where Ukrainians helped to save almost all Jews. There were no occupants in town. The former chairman of the village council, Strizhevskiy, was working at the commandant office in Mogilyov-Podolskiy during the war, and he warned his fellow villagers about the scheduled raids. When Germans or Romanians came to the village, Ukrainians went outside their houses to announce that there were no 'zhydy' [Jews] in their village. They gave shelter to their Jewish neighbors in their own houses. When the Red Army liberated the town, the Soviet authorities sentenced the village monitor, Korovianko, to ten years of imprisonment for cooperation with the fascists. He had personally saved dozens of Jews! My Uncle Isaac collected signatures of all the Jews in Yaruga that had been saved by Ukrainians and Korovianko, went to Moscow and managed to have Korovianko released. In Yaruga, Kuzma Bachinskiy told me that they were all trying to convince my father to stay with them in the village, but he was eager to reunite with his daughter. I couldn't stay in Yaruga for long. I had tears in my eyes and felt great pain in my heart. I left. I visited Yaruga last year when a film about the righteous men of Yaruga was being made.
Location
Ukraine
Interview
Simon Grinshpoon