Editor’s Note: This is the third of a five-part series that examines the Holocaust in western Ukraine that nearly wiped out the Jewish community during Nazi Germany’s occupation in World War II. This segment, “Surviving The Holocaust in Lviv,” tells the story of how one Ukrainian family helped a
LVIV – Genya Ruda was one of the few lucky ones. When Nazi occupiers created a ghetto for Jews in Lviv in 1942, the Petriv family bribed a guard to let the little girl out. Then they sheltered her for the rest of the war.
The rest of Ruda’s family perished, as did most of the estimated 220,000 Jews who were in Lviv during the war.
In 1995, the Petrivs were declared Righteous Among The Nations by Israel, an honor given to non-Jews who risked their lives or liberty to save Jews from extermination by the Nazis. Some 2,272 persons from Ukraine have been granted this status, placing the country fourth on the list of savior nations, preceded by Poland, the Netherlands and France.
But the rarity of acts of selfless heroism like that of the Petrivs raises the question of whether enough was done to help Jews like Ruda.
A map of Lviv ghetto as published in an archive copy of Lvivski Visti newspaper, courtesy of the Ukrainica department of the V. Stefanyk Lviv National Academic Library. (Pavlo Palamarchuk)
Historically, the region that comprises today’s western Ukraine boasted a large Jewish population, while Lviv was home to the third-largest Jewish community in what was then pre-war Poland. By the war’s end, most of the region’s Jews were dead.
Many Jews assert that Ukrainians – like other nationalities – were largely passive observers or eager participants as their brethren were rounded up into ghettos by the Nazis and sent to labor and concentration camps. Ukrainians, and others, respond there is little they could have done to help; under Nazi rule, aiding Jews was a crime punishable by death.
Ruda’s story, however, reveals much of the complexity of the times, the lack of clear black and white.
Sitting in a café not from the Lviv ghetto where she was interned as a child, Ruda prefers to speak of positive moments rather than to pass moral judgment on the individuals who lived in the city at the time.
“There were many good people,” Ruda said.
The groundwork for her salvation by the Petriv family was laid long before she was born.
Ruda does not know exactly when that was, as all of her family’s documents were destroyed in the war. But she does know she was born in Zolochiv. Her birth name was Gisel Bogner and her biological parents were named Mehel and Regina, from the family of Roth. Counting back the years, she figures she is 68.
One of the so-called Gates of Death in Lviv. (Pavlo Palamarchuk)
In 1922, Ruda’s aunt, her mother’s sister, met a 12-year-old girl named Kateryna at a market in Lviv. In those days, many villagers had traveled from the countryside to Lviv to escape the hunger that was sweeping the region and to look for work. Ruda’s aunt took pity on the girl, who by day’s end had still not found a job.
“She became a beloved member of the family,” said Ruda.
Kateryna took care of the aunt’s son, Manyk, married a man named Mykola Petriv, who was a baker and Hutsul, part of the ethnic group of highlanders who live in the Carpathian Mountains. She eventually gave birth to a daughter named Olha.
Then the war began.
When the Germans began rounding up Jews into ghettos throughout the region, Ruda’s aunt in Lviv frantically tried to get Ruda’s mother, Regina, and her to the city. She dispatched Mykola to Zolochiv, but he arrived too late; Ruda and her mother were already incarcerated in the town’s ghetto.
Undeterred, Mykola made arrangements to get Ruda and her mother out. Coming to an agreement with a guard, he and Ruda’s father, Mehel, planned their escape. That gesture, however, proved to be Mehel’s parting gift to his family. As they were running away, a Ukrainian guard shot Ruda’s father dead.
Ruda’s escape is given an interesting twist by the fact that Kateryna’s husband Mykola, who played a pivotal role in her rescue, was a member of the guerilla Ukrainian Insurgent Army, which was the military wing of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, an organization often accused of anti-Semitism.
Liberty in Lviv did not last long, after her presence was revealed by a neighbor.
“Within two weeks we were taken to the ghetto,” Ruda said.
At a ceremony on a cold January day commemorating Lviv’s victims of the Holocaust, Ruda recalled that Jews were allowed to only bring 20 kilograms of belongings into the ghetto.
“The lines went all the way to the Opera House,” she said.
Genya Ruda shows her parents’ photo. (Pavlo Palamarchuk)
The conditions in the ghetto were horrendous. Crowded quarters, lack of sanitation, no medication, meant that illness and death spread fast.
Mykola and Kateryna brought food into the ghetto, until it became no longer possible. By then, Manyk had died and a decision was made that Ruda be saved.
Once again, Mykola bribed a guard, and one day, along with his friend, Andriy Matvienko, “they went to the ghetto and helped get me out,” Ruda said.
That is when the Petrivs began to shuffle from one apartment to another in Lviv to avoid detection that they were harboring a Jew. They secured fake documents for Ruda, but those were precarious at best; the deceased child in the documents had been older than Ruda.
Discovery was a constant fear. Once, when they were out for a walk, Ruda innocently asked Kateryna to “tie my bendel.” It was a request any child could have made, except that it occurred on a busy street and Ruda had used the Yiddish word for “shoelace.” Yiddish was the spoken language of Central and Eastern European Jews.
“After that, Kateryna didn’t allow me out on the streets again,” Ruda said.
From the time Mykola had taken Ruda from the ghetto, she recalled he rarely spent nights at home to avoid capture for his nationalistic activities by the authorities, be they Nazi or Soviet.
Then, sometime in 1944, the decisive year when the Soviets took control of the city from the Nazis, the Petrivs made plans to leave Lviv.
“But Kateryna made a mistake,” Ruda said. “She told the [building] groundskeeper that we would be leaving at night and she could take what she wanted.”
That evening, Mykola was detained on the way to the apartment and shot. The Soviet then showed up at her door and told Kateryna and the girls “that we could unpack our bags,” Ruda said.
About a year later, Kateryna was arrested as the wife of a Ukrainian nationalist. Olha and Ruda were left to survive on their own. As she was being hauled away, Kateryna uttered words Ruda will never forget. “I’m sorry I couldn’t save your mother,” Kateryna cried as Ruda and the woman’s daughter, Olha, looked on in horror.
Kateryna was released several years later and returned to Lviv. She died in 1985. Olha, who became like a sister to Ruda, died in 2005.
UKRAINE’S VANISHED JEWS SERIES
Part 1 (June 24): Boris Orych and western Ukraine Jews
Part 2 (July 1): The killing grounds
Part 3 (July 8): Surviving The Holocaust In Lviv
Part 4 (July 15): Saving Jewish Heritage
Part 5 (July 22): Reconciliation?
Kyiv Post staff writer Natalia A. Feduschak can be reached at [email protected].
