Stoyanovskaya Marina

Stoyanovskaya, Marina The Staubs were a family of farmers living in Romanowka, not far from Trembowla (now Terebovlia, western Ukraine). The parents, Yitzhak and Toibe, had four children; Dov was the eldest. Yitzhak’s unmarried brother Leib Staub lived with them. Marina Stoyanovskaya was their housekeeper. The Soviet Union annexed the Polish territory in 1939, and the Germans occupied it in July 1941. Dov’s father was murdered soon afterward by a Ukrainian neighbor, and the family fled to Trembowla, where they initially stayed with relatives and then moved to the ghetto established in October 1942. Marina brought them a nanny goat, which greatly helped improve their diet. In spring 1943, Dov escaped the ghetto and went to the forest, hoping to join the partisans. His brother and sister, Moishe and Dolki, managed to escape the liquidation of the ghetto in early June 1943, and they joined him in the forest. Uncle Leib escaped to Tarnopol, where the ghetto still existed. Dov and his siblings went to Romanowka and knocked on Marina’s door, hoping to find shelter. Marina was willing to let them stay for only one night because she feared that her sister, who lived next door, would report her. The next morning, 19-year-old Dov gave his siblings what money he had and sent them to join their uncle in Tarnopol. He began to wander in the area and found a granary, where he hid without the knowledge of the owner. He went out in search of food at night and sat quietly during the day. A few days later the owner found him and sent him on his way, without betraying him to the authorities. With nowhere to go he returned to Marina, and she grudgingly let him stay. She hid him in the pen next to her house, where she kept her goat. There was a low-ceilinged loft where the chickens roosted, and he stayed there. Marina brought him food once a day—sometimes only bread and water, and sometimes something cooked. Once in a while Marina traveled to the city and took the goat with her so it would not be stolen. One time, Dov watched through a peephole as two armed fellows arrived at the house; but they did not enter the loft because it did not look large enough to hide a person. On one of her trips to the city, Marina managed to speak to Leib, who told her that the siblings had arrived. That was the last Dov heard of them. They were most likely murdered with the liquidation of the Tarnopol ghetto. Dov hid among the chickens for eight months, until the arrival of the Red Army. It was very difficult for him to walk when he finally left the roost, and he looked like a wild man, not having washed or shaven, wearing the same clothes he had worn the whole time. In early summer 1944, Dov attempted to join the Red Army but was sent to a labor camp in the Ural Mountains instead. He was released in 1946 and repatriated to Poland. In 1948, he immigrated to Israel. One day in the 1960s, Dov met a Jew from Terebovlia who had remained in Ukraine until 1957. This man told him that Marina had married a Jewish Red Army soldier after the war and had subsequently been murdered, the circumstances unclear. On March 4, 2014, Yad Vashem recognized Marina Stoyanovskaya as Righteous Among the Nations.