Shevchenko Ivan

Shevchenko, Ivan Before the war, Ivan Shevchenko, a young communist, lived in Równe, Wołyń (today Rivne, Rivne District). In the first days of the German-Soviet war, he joined the army. He soon became a prisoner of war but he managed to escape and return to Równe. He then found a job as a truck driver for a German company. Among the employees there, he met Riva Tov, a young woman who worked in accounting. Tov lived in the city’s ghetto and for a few weeks after the ghetto was liquidated, in July 1942, Shevchenko provided her with food until she found a home with her aunt in the ghetto in the nearby town of Zdołbunów (Zdolbuniv). Shevchenko occasionally visited Tov in Zdołbunów and, on one of his trips there, he met Yakov Sukhenko*. The two became friends and together they began to hatch a plan to help their Jewish comrades flee to eastern Ukraine. Sukhenko told Shevchenko that some weeks previously he had acquired false identity papers in his family name for Varvara Barats and her daughter Miriam Rycer, and they both succeeded in reaching the town of Pomoshnaya (Pomichna) in eastern Ukraine, where they found work and an apartment. With this in mind, Shevchenko married Tov in a fictitious ceremony and then he took her to Pomoshnaya as Anna Shevchenko. In 1943, Shevchenko and Sukhenko obtained more false identity papers, most of which were made out in their family names, and gave them to Jews. They then escorted their wards to Kiev, including Tov’s brother. When they arrived at the apartment that Sukhenko had rented for the purpose they were all arrested and then executed. The three women living under false identities in Pomoshnaya soon became concerned after not hearing from their rescuers for some time and sent Tov to Kiev to find out what had become of them. When she discovered their tragic fate, she did not return to Pomoshnaya as she feared that she was being followed, and she headed for Tiraspol in Moldavia. There, a former classmate recognized her andbetrayed her to the Gestapo. She was killed just a few weeks before the liberation, in spring 1944. After the war, Varvara Barats began to write her memoirs, which she dedicated to the memory of Shevchenko and Sukhenko. She and her daughter later immigrated to Israel. On June 25, 1991, Yad Vashem recognized Ivan Shevchenko as Righteous Among the Nations.