Israel awarded Volodymyr and Pavlina Stolyarchuk the honorary title of the Righteous Among the Nations
The village of Makhnivka in the Vinnytsia region was a populous Jewish village before the Holocaust.
According to the census of 1897, out of 5,343 residents of Makhnivka there were 2,149 Orthodox Christians, 759 Roman Catholics, and 2,435 Jews. Here in the late nineteenth century the Hasidic dynasty of the same name was born. Today Makhniv Hasidim live in Bnei Brak in Israel.
By the beginning of the Nazi occupation in July 1941 there were about 800 Jews in the village. Almost all of them were shot on September 9, 1941 in the nearby Zhezhelevo Forest.
Maria Milman and her son Mykhailo may have been the only ones among the Makhniv Jews who managed to survive in September 1941. They also were marching in the column to be shot. What saved them was that three-year-old Misha (Mykhailo) addressed his mother in Ukrainian. The guard heard it and took them out of the column.
However, the salvation was still only temporary. Sooner or later the Jewish origin of the Milmans would have come to light. If not for the help of Pavlina and Vladimir (Volodymyr) Stolyarchuk who lived in the same village. They hid the Jews in their home, and made documents for them in a couple of months, by which the Milmans became Ukrainians with the surname the Kovalenkos.
The State of Israel awarded Volodymyr and Pavlina Stolyarchuk the honorary title of the Righteous Among the Nations for saving the Milman family.
Israeli Ambassador to Ukraine Michael Brodsky presented the medal and the certificate of the Yad Vashem — The World Holocaust Remembrance Center to Alina Zinchenko, the great-granddaughter of the Righteous.
