Melnychuk Arsen, Kateryna and Vira

Arsen and Kateryna Melnychuk and their daughter Vira lived in the village of Andrushivka in the Ternopil region. The family was religious – they belonged to a local community of Evangelical Christian Baptists. The couple without any doubts agreed to shelter in their house two Jewish girls who escaped from the Nazi ghetto.

Dina and Ruth Steinman lived with their parents in the town of Shumsk. In the spring of 1942, the family found themselves in the ghetto. The mother was executed right afterwards. The girls and their father worked as forced laborers. One day, one of the guards told Ruth that the ghetto was going to be liquidated in August and that he was ready to help them escape if they paid him. The sisters took advantage of this opportunity. After long wanderings through the forests, they ended up staying with the Melnychuk family in the village of Andrushivka, while their father was hiding in another village. Arsen and Kateryna took care of the girls, especially Ruth, who got typhus and almost died. Several local Baptist families from time to time helped to hide the Jewish girls by providing food and warm clothes.

After the war, Ruth and Dina Steinman emigrated to Israel. A decade later, Ruth's daughter, Gila Hertz, traveled to Ukraine, and visited her mother's and aunt's homeland and found Vira Melnychuk. She knew from her mother's stories about the daughter of the rescuers, who helped her parents and spent a lot of time with her Jewish sisters.

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In 2013, Yad Vashem recognized Arsen, Kateryna, and Vira Melnychuk as Righteous Among the Nations.