Sanevych Ivan, Hanna, Tetiana, Petro and Daryna

The Sanevich couple, Ivan and Hanna, lived with their four children in the village of Yurivka, near the town of Liubar in the Zhytomyr region. The family worked in agriculture.

In the fall of 1941, while working in the field, Hanna noticed two non-local teenagers, a boy and a girl, hiding in the bushes. When she came closer, she realized that they were Jewish. Both were hungry, dirty, and very scared. The woman took them into her house, washed and fed them. Buzia and Dmytro Shmaiher told her about themselves. They lived with their parents in the town of Liubar. When the Nazis occupied the village, they moved them to an open ghetto without a fence, guarded by German and local police. Those who escaped through the orchards or gardens were usually caught. The ghetto quickly ran out of food, and starvation spread. Only those Jews who belonged to work teams were allowed to leave the ghetto. The shootings of the Jewish population in Liubar began about a week after the occupation started and repeated periodically.

The occupants started liquidation of the ghetto in the morning of September 13, 1941. At first, Jews were gathered in a school building, then in an orphanage on the territory of a former monastery. There they were thoroughly searched, and everything they still had was taken away. From there, the doomed people were taken by truck to a sand quarry in the north of the village, where the executions took place. Buzia and Dmytro knew nothing about the fate of their parents. They were lucky to slip out of a window before the Jews from the orphanage were taken to the sand quarry. After that, they wandered through the fields until Hanna found them.

For three months, the Sanevychs took care of the children. The older sisters Tetiana and Daryna were the same age as the Jewish children, so they quickly got along with them, and Petro taught 13-year-old Dmytro how to do the housework. In the winter, raids became more frequent in the village, so it was dangerous for Jews to stay in the Ukrainian family. Ivan Sanevych managed to get documents for Buzia with the name of Hanna Ilchuk and the next day sent her and her brother to a distant village.

In the summer of 1943, the girl was sent to forced labor in Germany. She spent the rest of the war in Finsterwalde, about 100 kilometers south of Berlin. Her brother survived the German occupation in Ukraine.

After the war, Buzia and Dmytro lived in their native village of Liubar. In the 1990s, they emigrated to Israel with their children and grandchildren. They kept in touch with their rescuers all the time.

In 1993, Yad Vashem recognized Ivan and Hanna Sanevych as Righteous Among the Nations, and in 1994 their children Tetiana, Petro, and Daryna were awarded this title as well.