Sydorenko (Melikh) Hanna

Ukrainian Hanna Melikh worked as a domestic worker for the Lviv Jewish family of the Vais, and raised their two children: Adam and Tosia. On the eve of the German-Soviet war, she got married, later gave birth to a daughter, Maria. On June 30, 1941, Lviv was occupied by Hitler's troops, and Hanna lost contact with her Jewish family for a certain time.

On November 6, 1941, the German occupation authorities issued an order to create a ghetto. According to researchers, there were about 150 thousand Jews in the city, of which 110 thousand were native residents, and 40 thousand were refugees from German-occupied Poland. According to the order, they all had to move to the IV district, which began behind the opera house and was considered the poorest. Instead, Ukrainians and Poles who lived in houses on the territory of that district had to move to the "non-Jewish" part of Lviv. In this way, the Jewish community was planned to be separated from the rest of the population, and Nazi propaganda spread a negative image of the Jew. The Germans established control in the ghetto. Its residents could not freely move around the city, use property, public transport, or visit public places. They had the right to leave the territory of the ghetto only when going to work.

At first, the Nazis were going to form a ghetto by the end of 1941, but this was prevented by an outbreak of typhus, so the implementation of the plan was postponed until February 1942. In March of the same year, 15 thousand elderly people, women, and children from the ghetto were sent to the Belzec death camp (Poland).  The Jews who remained were also threatened with death.

One day in the spring, Hanna heard someone calling her name from her apartment. Looking out the window, she saw 10-year-old Tosia Vais. The woman quickly brought the girl into the house, and she told that her mother and brother were killed, and she ran away. Remembering where the former governess lives, the child ran in the hope of finding her. Hanna hid Tosia in the basement of the house, and told the neighbors that she was the daughter of her relatives. But Tosia's Jewish appearance quickly gave her away, and a local policeman advised Hanna to take her to the ghetto, warning of the consequences.

The very next day, Hanna applied to the local employment office, where she was offered a job as a cook in one of the towns in Poland. After receiving permission to leave, the woman asked to be issued the relevant documents for her two daughters: three-year-old Mariia and ten-year-old Tosia. All three left and returned to Lviv in the summer of 1945.

Since none of Tosia's relatives survived the Holocaust, Hanna took official guardianship over the girl. Before marriage, Tosia (later Antonina Novikova) lived with Hanna and her daughter Mariia.

In 1996, Yad Vashem recognized Hanna Sydorenko (Melikh) as the Righteous Among the Nations.