Oleksandra Romanchenko
Oleksandra’s mother, Ustyniya Petrenko, was born in 1908 to the peasants family in Shatura village not far from Nizhyn, Chernigiv region.
She finished a seven-year school. At the age of 15 she started to work on a collective farm. In 1930 Usеyniya married a fellow villager Mykhailo Petrenko. She gave birth to 7 children, 4 of whom died young.
In 1940 straight after the birth of her daughter Oleksandra, her beloved husband died of a serious illness. Ustya remained alone with three children. The war began…
In September 1941, the Nazis came to the village of Shatura. Fellow villager Grygoriy Varukh was appointed the village headman. The village council had plenary powers and was responsible for almost all affairs in the village.
During these terrible days one dark autumn night of 1941, there was a careful knock on the window of Ustynia’s house. They were two sisters, Sonya and Dvoira (15 and 16 years old), the daughters of an acquaintance, a Jewish woman named Rachel Medvedev from Nizhyn.
Ustya, risking her own life and the lives of her three small children, one of whom was just born Olexandra, let girls, who had lost both parents, stay at her home (as it turned out, for two and a half years). To all difficulties faced added daily fear and mortal risk.
There were rumors in the village that Jewish girls were hiding in one of the houses. One day the headman appeared in the yard, Ustya was scared, because she hid the girls on the stove under rags and pillows. The headman reassured her and promised to warn her of any threats and kept his word. He advised to take the girls to work in the field. The woman dressed the girls in embroidered shirts. She put the scarves on girls’ heads to cover their faces. Sometimes, when she sent girls to the collective farm field, she dirtied their faces for camouflage. When someone else came to the village with inspections, the headman warned. At that time, the girls did not go outside, or even fled the village and hid in the woods. When it became calm, the village headman brought them back to Ustynia.
The villagers knew that she had adopted the orphans of an acquaintance. Perhaps someone guessed that the girls were the grandchildren of Yankel Berkov Bogrechevsky, a Jew, who lived in Shatura until 1917. It is difficult to imagine what would have happened if the Medvedevs had been found out by the police.
The girls were lucky. The headman helped Ustynia save them. The sisters became real members of mum Ustya’s family. They felt it throughout the war years and in the postwar time. Ustynia treated them like her own children. Younger Vera called her mother almost from the first days.
After the war, the girls lived in Nizhyn. They visited Ustynia almost every weekend to help with the household. And when their rescuer was old, they washed her feet as a sign of their respect and love. Ustynia died on April 20, 2003.
On March 23, 1998 Yad Vashem recognized Ustyniya Petrenko as Righteous Among the Nations.