Tontysh Fyodor & Uliana

Tontysh, Fyodor Tontysh, Uliana Fyodor and Uliana Tontysh lived in Rybnitsa with their two daughters. Until the summer of 1941, Fyodor worked as a laborer in a sugar plant and Uliana was a housewife. One of their neighbors was a Jewish family of three generations: the grandparents Motya and Reyza Tsysin, the son Avrum married to Neha, their two daughters Mania and Klara and their son Vladimir and his wife and son. Avrum’s sister, Fanya, lived with her husband Israel Tsatskin and their two daughters Sima and Sofia, on the same street. During the first period of the city’s occupation by the Germans, the grandparents hid with Fanya and her family. But they were caught and sent to the ghetto in Balta. After some time, Avrum and his family were deported to the Rybnitsa ghetto, which in the meantime had come under Romanian control. There, Fyodor Tontys brought them food from his plot of land. In the winter of 1942, Motya and Reiza were sent from the ghetto in Balta to the Domanevka camp. After they succeeded in escaping, they returned to Rybnitsa and at first hid in the Tontysh home and later, when the situation in the ghetto seemed to be stable and not menacing, they moved there. Fyodor lived from the produce he grew on his small plot of land and then sold, continued to help the Tsysin family members who were interned in the Rybnitsa ghetto as well as the part of the family that was interned in the Balta ghetto. Fanya’s husband, Israel Tsatskin, was murdered on March 28, 1944, together with other Jews from Balta in a building that the Germans set on fire on the eve of the liberation of the area by the Red Army. The Tsysin grandparents and the family members who were in the Rybnitsa ghetto, fled early in March 1944, and for more than two weeks again hid in the Tontysh home. Their rescuers risked their own lives and those of their young daughters in hiding them, because, despite the general confusion caused by the advance of the Red Army, the authoritiescontinued to severely punish any locals who helped Jews. The Tontyshes regarded their act as a moral duty towards friends in trouble. On April 2, 2000, Yad Vashem recognized Fyodor and Uliana Tontysh as Righteous Among the Nations