Humeniuk Mefodii and Yevhenia

The village medical assistant Mefodiy Humeniuk lived with his family in the village of Pisochyn, Vinnytsia region. Together with his wife he brought up three children: Polina, Zoya and Eduard. As a war medic he took part in the armed conflict on the Khalkhin Gol River. He brought the orphaned boy Vasyl from there, whom he adopted later. In 1939 his wife died of anthrax. Mefodiy remained a widower with four teenage children. On the eve of the Second World War, the young midwife Yevhenia Kovtun came to the village. Mefodiy, being a mature man, fell in love with 20-year-old Yevhenia and married her shortly after that.

During the war the senior daughter of Mefodiy, 16-year-old Polina, kept contacts with the partisans. She took the wounded fighters from the Nemyriv forest to her father’s house. Being afraid that someone could denounce the family, the Humeniuks moved to the neighboring Potoky village. After the extermination of the Jewish population started, the familiar doctor from the Vinnytsia hospital with the surname Kyrychenko contacted Mefodiy and asked to harbor his family – the Jewish wife and children. In spite of the danger, the Humeniuks sheltered the Jews in their house until the end of the region’s occupation. After the war they moved to the village of Zhornyshche in the Illintsi district. The Jewish family helped them purchase the house on the new place. In 1949 the couple gave birth to their daughter Tamara.

“... I don’t remember the name of the doctor from Vinnytsia. I only remember that his wife worked as an actress and they had two children, Dima and Ira. I know this from my parents. However, I remember the mid-1950s, when I was 5 years old, very well, when Kyrychenko came to us with Dima. He loved me very much. He always took me in his hands, kissed me and brought me gifts. When we went to Vinnytsia, 70 km away, my parents stopped not at the nephews, but at the family of Kyrychenko. When I was 10, my father died and my mother lost connection with this family. There was no need to go to Vinnytsia, and there was no phone connection at that time… Few years ago in Zhornyshchi, where my family resettled in 1944 and where I graduated from school, I visited the local farmers to buy apples for winter. The house owner Halyna Andriyevska told me that the man from Vinnytsia came to her to buy apples and asked her about our family, and told that my father saved his family of Kyrychenko from death during the Holocaust. I don’t know who that was. Mom died almost 40 years ago, and there are no witnesses in Zhornyshcha, where we lived after the war. The village of Pisochyn is dead now, as well as almost 700 Ukrainian villages. People live in Potoky, but, I think, there is no chance to find the witnesses there. In addition, more than 75 years passed since that time…”. From the memories of Tamara Khrushch

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