Danyliuk Zoya (Zonia)

Zoya (Zonia) Danyliuk lived in the village of Obuhiv in Vinnytsia region. Her only daughter Hanna got married in 1941 and lived in one of the villages near Kyiv.

In the summer of 1942, Zoya noticed a boy wandering around the village offering his help with work in exchange for food and lodging. One evening, he asked to spend the night in a haystack in her yard, and she invited him to her house. The stranger was nine-year-old Mykhailo Kurtzman, who had been wandering around Podillia for several weeks. The boy told the woman about the tragic fate of the Jews of his native town of Derazhnia (Khmelnytskyi region). He saw how his father, mother, brothers and sisters were mercilessly killed, and he, full of a great desire for life, decided on a desperate step - to escape ...

"These were the most terrible moments of my life. The sun was warm, the birds were singing, and I was soaked in someone else's blood, not feeling my numb body... Only late at night I got out of the terrible hiding place. I didn't know where to go, what to do, but my legs took me somewhere. In the morning, I watched the shepherds warming themselves by the fire. They didn’t ask anything, they probably guessed who I was, brought water for me to wash, gave a piece of bread... In the village where I came with the shepherds, good people gave me different clothes and advised me to stay away from these places... In Obukhiv, I joined to a group of boys playing in the paddock. At that time, a woman went to the well to fetch water. She immediately noticed me and asked someone whose I was, where I was from. She was told that I was the son of a forester... And in the evening I knocked on the door of her house and asked to spend the night in a haystack in the yard... She not only sheltered me, but listened to my story, fed me, bathed me, combed my head from lice , changed clothes, brought grandfather-barber and said: "Now you will be my grandson..."". From the memoirs of Mykhailo Kurtzman.

A rumor quickly spread through the village that Zonia (as her fellow villagers called her) was hiding a Jewish child. Some of the local residents condemned the act, so she had to send the boy to her daughter for a certain time. It was a very difficult way: by railway, "on transfer lines" to the city of Kyiv itself... And when the situation in the village became calmer, Zoya again brought Mykhailo to her house, where he stayed for two and a half years, until the expulsion of the Nazis from region. All this time, the rescued helped the rescuer in the household, took care of the garden. Sometimes the two of them would go to a nearby town to sell some apples.

After the war, Mykhailo Kurtzman stayed in the house of Zoya Danyliuk. In 1946, he visited Derazhnia, where he found a message at the post office from his aunt, who was looking for relatives who survived the Holocaust. He answered that letter, but refused to leave the village of  Obukhiv. Although later Zoya convinced him to move to his aunt in the village of Letychiv. In June 1946, Mykhailo left his savior, but corresponded with her until her death in 1967. Later he left for Israel.

On November 8, 1998, Yad Vashem awarded Zoya (Zonia) Danyliuk with the honorary title "Righteous Among the Nations".