A Jewish girl was saved by a Ukrainian family during World War II and now her grandchildren are returning the favor

Ukrainian cousins and refugees Lesia Orshoko and Alona Chugai are among the millions who are fleeing Ukraine while Russian forces invade their country. But in a wartime twist of fate, the cousins landed in Israel last week to meet a friendly face, someone who was returning a kindness from decades of past.

The friendly face was Sharon Bass, whose Jewish grandmother was protected and saved by Lesia's grandmother in Ukraine during the Holocaust.

Sharon said it was an honor for her to welcome the cousins and return the immeasurable kindness of almost 80 years ago.

It felt like history was repeating itself, he said. But in this case, it's a reversal of the norm. Jews have been persecuted throughout our history. We have been killed, kicked out or forced to flee every country we've stayed in long enough. But this time we have the privilege and responsibility of being a safe haven for others on the run.

Sharon, 46, said that when she saw the attacks in Ukraine, her thoughts immediately turned to her grandmother, Fania Rosenfeld Bass, and her remarkable survival while hiding from the Nazis.

Fania was a teenager in the Ukrainian city of Rafalowka when the Germans invaded, forcing Jews into ghettos and slave labor camps. Most of his family were killed, including his parents and five siblings, whose bodies were dumped into open unmarked wells in the Rafalowka forest. Her younger sister was only 6 years old. But Fania fled and survived, and would return, years later, with other survivors and her daughter Chagit in tow, to create a monument at the site of the massacre.

Fania was not saved by accident or coincidence. Her life was very actively saved by a brave non-Jewish Ukrainian woman named Maria Blyshchik. Maria and her extended family hid Fania for the last two years of the war, until shortly before Rafalowka was liberated by the Red Army in February 1944.

Fania moved to Israel and started a family, telling the story over and over to her children and grandchildren, letting them know about the good people who clung to their humanity and quietly rebelled against the horrors of war. The family of Fania and Maria, who stayed in Ukraine, lost contact immediately after liberation and during the following years. But then technology made communication easier, and families reconnected in the 1990s and have been in regular communication ever since.

Sharon grew up listening to the story of Maria's bravery and Fania's survival. He said he didn't hesitate for a moment to contact Lesia, 36, and Alona, 47, last month to offer them help when the war broke out.

I spoke to Sharon on the phone to ask her about how to get the cousins out of Ukraine and take them to Israel. He explained that families were in frequent contact even before the invasion, describing them as “part of the family” and “even closer than a blood connection.”

As soon as the situation became grim in Ukraine, Sharon began planning how to make them safe in Israel. She explained that “neither I nor they could imagine that the situation would develop as it did, in the war, but when it did and it was time to act, we decided that the best thing we could do was to bring them here, to a place where they could be safe.”

At first, Sharon encountered a lot of bureaucracy and bureaucracy. Then, he shared the extraordinary story with Roy Rubinstein from YNET news from Israel. Suddenly, people were captivated and eager to help. Israel is a small country, about the size of New Jersey, and often operates as a small town. Public pressure began to increase. The story had an even wider audience when Stop Antisemitism, an Instagram page, translated some of Roy's reports.

Before long, Sharon's request for help reached a former head of the Jewish Agency, and from there, to the Israeli Foreign Ministry, where high-ranking politicians got involved personally to help her reduce the usual bureaucracy.

Disturbingly, the approval of the visa of Lesia and Alona came on the third anniversary of the death of Fania, who lived until the age of 97.

Once the bureaucracy was out of the way, there was still logistics on the ground. Lesia and Alona had to leave Ukraine. First they went by bus from their homes in the small towns of Volodymyrets and Borova to the Polish border, and then to Warsaw, where they boarded a plane for Munich. From there, Sharon and a friend of Alona shared the cost of the cousins' flights to Tel Aviv. They landed in Israel on March 6.

Hearing Fania's daughter, Chagit, tell me about her arduous journey outside Ukraine, I found myself thinking about my own grandparents' panic flights from Vienna and Berlin to New York in the late 1930s. Everything felt so familiar, wartime refugees running for their lives.

But the story of Fania couldn't be more different from that of her descendants, and the same goes for Maria, the woman who saved her. Now the same story of a persecuted people in need of help is developing again, but the other way around for these families.

Israel has played an important role in the life of Mary's family for some time.

Lesia, Maria's granddaughter, and Alona, Maria's great niece, have been to Israel before, and their extended families have had roots in Israel long before the current war in Ukraine.

In 1995, Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust Museum, honored the entire extended family as “Righteous Among the Nations,” the prize given to non-Jews who risked their lives to protect Jews during the Holocaust. In the years since then, several of the extended family members have traveled to Israel to work for a few years at a time, with economic prospects in the “emerging nation” more promising than in Ukraine.

One of them has stayed permanently: Luba Blyshchik, one of Maria's 10 children, started working as a caregiver for the elderly Fania almost 20 years ago, and continued to do so until her death in 2019. Luba's mother saved Fania's life; Luba helped preserve him.

When I asked Sharon and Chagit if there were more family members beyond Lesia and Alona who wanted to emigrate to Israel, Sharon told me, “Yes, many more. At the moment we are trying to work on the rescue of two women, one with seven children and the other with four.”

Leaving is not an easy decision. For Alona and Lesia, the decision was tense. Sharon described her tears as she landed in Tel Aviv and reunited with Sharon as “complicated and full of mixed feelings.”

I spoke to Alona five days after she arrived in Israel, and she said to me: “I am happy to be here and in the warmth and safety of the Bass family, which are like a second family to me, but I am also thinking about the whole family that I left behind in Ukraine that is still in danger.” Alona's mother, father, brother and nephews are still in Ukraine.

There is guilt that comes with survival and escape, a psychological phenomenon that Fania's family understands well.

For now, Alona and Lesia have received temporary visas. Sharon, along with her family, is trying to help them obtain permanent citizenship, and says that for as long as they want, their home is their home.

She told me, “Maria didn't put a time limit on how long she protected Fania, and neither should we.”

(c) The Washington Post

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