Didukh Andrii and Anelia, Petrushka (Didukh) Stefaniia

Andrii and Aneliia Didukh and their daughter Stefaniia lived in the village of Triitsia village in the Lviv region. Before the war, they were good friends with the Jewish family of Pechenyk from the neighboring village of Toporiv. They had a few shops, and Andrii often bought food from them.

When anti-Jewish violence broke out, the four Pechenyk brothers, Yosyp, Yakub, Mailakh, and Shmuel, asked the Didukhs for shelter. They told them that their parents were gone and that they managed to escape from the village at night through the woods. The couple made the difficult decision to rescue the boys, even though they lived in a one-room house. That very night they dug a pit in the barn, took out the soil with bags, and by morning the shelter was ready.

"I remember everything in the smallest detail because I was already 12 years old. It was the spring of 1942. My parents did not hide anything from me, I heard all the conversations that evening. My parents didn't even discuss it, they just took the boys. Maybe it was also because my father was a doctor and was ready to sacrifice his life to save another. It was a time when children grew up quickly. Even when I played with other children, I controlled every word. When we talked about the lives of our parents, everyone kept their mouths shut. It wasn't that I was silent, my task was to keep an eye on everything that was happening on the street. And when there were raids, I ran home and warned the boys. And there were a lot of such raids. I remember one day when a few policemen came to our house, one of them put a gun to my chest and asked if there were any Jews in the house. They said they would shoot everyone if they found them. They searched for a very long time, stabbing the hay in the attic, lighting it with a lamp..." From the testimony of Stefaniia Petrushka (Didukh)

They did not find the boys then. Nor did they find them all the following times. The Pechenyk brothers secretly lived with the Didukhs until the end of the German occupation. After the war, they emigrated to Poland and eventually moved to Israel and the United States. The families lost connection for 20 years. In 1965, one of the brothers, Yosyp, found his rescuers in Lviv. Since then, their families have been in touch.

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In 2013, Andrii and Anelia Didukh and their daughter Stefaniia Petrushka were awarded the title of Righteous Among the Nations.