Buks Mykola and Mykhailyna

Mykola and Mykhailyna Buks lived in the village of Yaseniv in the Lviv region, raised ten children. During the Holocaust, they sheltered persecuted Jews in their house, saving their lives.

Before the war, there were seven Jewish families in the village of Yaseniv. Among them were the Zandberh couple with their daughter and two sons. The family was engaged in agriculture and traded in fur. The occupiers confiscated their land, and later, during a search of the house, they killed their father, Eliezer. Mother Feih with her younger children Khanna and Mordkhei managed to escape. The eldest, 20-year-old Adam, was not at home. He worked in the coalmines with his uncle Simkha. When rumors began to spread among the workers that the Jews would be sent to the ghetto in the nearby city of Brody, the two of them tried to escape, but they were not lucky. Later, the boy did manage to get free and join his mother, brother and sister, who were hiding with the family of Mykola and Mykhailyna Buks. Times were hard – a Ukrainian couple with ten children lived without food. Still, there were opportunities throughout the year to share food with Jews.

After the expulsion of the Nazis from the region, Adam joined the Red Army, and Feiha and the younger children remained in the village. Later, she died under unknown circumstances. In 1948, Adam and his brother and sister moved to Poland, and then to Israel. All contact with the family of Buks was lost for a decade. Only in 2004, Mordkhei Zandberh visited his native village and found the children of his saviors. I remembered some of them very well, because I was their age.

In 2011, Yad Vashem recognized Mykola and Mykhailyna Buks as Righteous Among the Nations.

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