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| Israel-Palestine |
| Seven honored as Righteous Gentiles |
| 2004-07-15 |
| The year was 1943, and in much of Europe the Nazi death machine was proceeding with its systematic obliteration of European Jewry. But as the mass murder continued, individual pockets of light, however small, shone out brilliantly amidst the otherwise total blackness. In the German-occupied Polish village of Buczacz, which today is in Ukraine, two Jewish families who managed to escape the ghetto had made their way to the surrounding fields, where they took cover from the final Nazi deportation. As they lay hiding in the fields, a Ukrainian farmer, Stepan Chaikovski, happened upon the group and brought them to a barn near his home. For the next nine months, he and his wife, Anna, hid the seven members of the Heled and Halperin families under the haystacks in their barn, providing them with food, water and shelter for no compensation. "He didn’t know us before he met us; we couldn’t offer him any money since we had been robbed of all our possessions... I think he did it for the love of his fellow man. I have no other explanation," said Mordechai Halperin, 74, at a ceremony Wednesday at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, where the Chaikovskis were two of seven people from Ukraine and Belarus who were posthumously honored as "Righteous Among the Nations," Yad Vashem’s most coveted award. "Were it not for him, I would not be standing here today," Halperin said, in a ceremony that was attended by the Chaikovskis’ daughter, Miroslava Luchka, who received the awards on her parents’ behalf. |
| Posted by:Mark Espinola |