Hotsyk Anastasiia

In November 1943, a Jewish girl knocked on Anastasiia Hotsyk's door in the village of Karpylivka, in Volyn. Trembling from the cold, the child asked to let her in to warm herself. The woman gave her some dry clothes from her 11-year-old daughter Vassa and fed her. The guest introduced herself as Masha and said she was from the town of Kamin-Kashyrskyi and was 10 years old. Together with her father, she escaped from the ghetto, where two of her younger brothers and her grandmother were shot last year. Her father told her to go to the village of Verkhy to a woman he knew, while he returned to the ghetto to save his wife and eldest son. No one helped Masha in that village, so she begged from local villagers and wandered from one village to another.

Anastasiia decided to keep Masha at her place. She warned her children Pavlo and Vassa that no one should know about it. She arranged a hiding place for the Jewish girl behind the oven. The children quickly became friends, and Vassa was especially close to Masha. Every evening the girls climbed on the oven to talk and play.

One night, local partisans came into their house, and Masha, who was hiding behind the oven, recognized the voice of her cousin Abba Klurman. He told her that her parents and brother were killed. A few weeks later, Abba took Masha to the forest. Anastasiia worried about the fate of the girl because there was a permanent fight in the forest between Soviet partisans, Germans, and Banderites. However, Masha survived thanks to the care of a relative. In 1945, she left the USSR and two years later settled in Israel. Anastasiia faced a tragic fate. She was killed by local bandits in late 1943.

In 2001, Masha Wolfstahl (Dreisen) visited Ukraine again and found Vassa Dmytruk (Hotsyk) in the village of Karpylivka. Thus, after almost 60 years, the connection between the Ukrainian and Jewish families was reestablished.

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In 2010, Yad Vashem recognized Anastasiia Hotsyk as Righteous Among the Nations.