Novak (Nanynets) Olga

The town of Boryslav in the Lviv region, known from Ivan Franko’s poetry, is located 75 km southwest of Lviv. It was considered the “petroleum capital” of Galicia. As in many other settlements of the region, the Jewish community occupied a prominent place in the life of Boryslav. Traditional businesses of local Jews were trade and oil production. It is known that on the eve of World War II in Boryslav there were about 13 thousand Jews. A tragic turn in the history of the Boryslav Jewish community occurred on July 1, 1941, when German troops entered the town.

The very next day the first pogroms against Jews took place. The Nazis, as well as some local collaborators, killed about 300 Jews. Then a ghetto was set up in the town. At the end of November 1941, the organized extermination of Boryslav Jews began – they were shot in the woods, and in 1942 some groups were deported to the Janowska concentration camp and the Belzec extermination camp. In total, about 10,000 Boryslav Jews died as a result of this terror.

 In those terrible days an amazing story of salvation took place in Boryslav, which helped the whole family survive the Holocaust. The rescuer was a young girl Olga Nanynets, who was only 22 years old at the beginning of the German-Soviet war. She grew up in an Orthodox family: her father was a forester and her mother a schoolteacher. Parent’s house was located in the village of Plavya. Olga herself worked as a secretary of the town council and rented an apartment in the town together with her friend Stanislava Sokolovska.

When the extermination of the Jews began in Boryslav, few people could help the doomed people, knowing of the death penalty in case of detection. Nevertheless, in August 1942, Olga helped a neighboring Jewish family of Wizer. They hid from the massacre in the basement of the house. Olga brought them food and water, told about the news in Boryslav.

It was fateful for her to meet Leszek Nadler. At the time of meeting Olga, he was 33 years old, a Jew from Boryslav, and working at a wax factory. Leszek was extremely concerned about the fate of his mother Tsylia and 25-year-old sister Alka. They needed a hiding place: if he, as a worker, was not in extreme danger of death, his family had no such guarantees.

Olga sheltered the whole Nadler family in a small apartment they rented with Stanislava Sokolovska. It is important to emphasize the role of a friend: she gave her tacit consent to the rescue, and, therefore, risked no less than Olga.

Danger was everywhere, and its primary source could be neighbors – they suspected that there were "secret" residents in the house and could report it to the Nazis to protect themselves. Therefore, the situation required decisive action. Olga managed to obtain false "Aryan" documents for Alka, Leszek's sister, whom she sent to hide in the village of Kalne, 120 km from Boryslav. Her married sister, Dziunia, lived there. In Dziunia’s house Alka survived the Nazi occupation until the arrival of the Red Army.

Tsylia also managed to escape. She was sheltered by a former housekeeper of the Nadler family, a Ukrainian girl Anastasia. Later, Olga rented a large apartment on the top floor of the house where the ice cream factory was located. Leszek and Tsylia moved there, but the mother died during the Nazi occupation. It is known that Olga also helped other Jews to escape – Nadler's relatives Gustav and Adele Schindelman, an orphan boy Adolf Stern and Dolek Vekselberg, who was married to Ukrainian woman. They all stayed alive and witnessed the liberation of Boryslav from the Nazis in August 1944. After that, the rescued migrated around the world.

In 1945, the lives of Olga Nanynets and Leszek Nadler changed radically. The rescuer and the rescued married and moved to Australia. Novak became the couple's new surname.

On March 31, 2003, Olga Novak's feat during the war received recognition. She was awarded the title of Righteous Among the Nations. Olga Novak died in 2011.