Yanus Ilya & Vassa

Yanus, Ilya Yanus, Vassa Kaminski, Saveli Kaminska, Marfa Ilya and Vassa Yanus lived with their two young children in the village of Novoselki in the county of Wlodzimierz, district of Wolyn. The Germans conquered the area on July 10, 1941, and in October 1941, after the majority of the local Jews were murdered, a labor camp was established in Wlodzimierz for the remaining Jews. The authorities permitted several farmers with carts to enter the camp occasionally in order to sell or barter produce. Thus, Ilya, who was a farmer, met up with his acquaintance, Israel Perl, a cobbler. Perl told Yanus that his wife and children had been killed earlier but he had been saved because he was a skilled worker. In the ghetto, Perl met a woman with two children from Krivoy Rog in the eastern Ukraine, and he registered her as his wife in order to allow them a chance of survival. When the liquidation of the ghetto appeared imminent, Perl asked Yanus to save this woman and her children. One day in 1943, Yanus hid the three Jews, Chaya Kogonzon, ten-year-old Roza (later Zilbert), and seven-year-old Anatoliy, in his cart and took them away. Yanus and his wife dug a well-concealed hole in their garden and the three Jews stayed there for over six months. When a rumor spread in the village that the Yanuses were harboring Jews, Kogonzon and her children returned to Wlodzimierz, to the building they had lived in inside the camp, which was now empty of Jews. Homeless people, among them Saveli Kaminski, his wife, Marfa, and their three children, had meanwhile moved into the abandoned homes. A few weeks earlier, Ukrainian nationalists had driven out the Polish Kaminskis from their village home. Being refugees themselves, the Kaminskis were sympathetic to the Kogonzons’ plight and they shared the very little they had with the Jewish family. Furthermore, they helped Kogonzon obtain identity papers in a Russian name. The Kogonzons lived under this alias until the liberation, on January 3, 1944. After the war, Kogonzon’s husband, Gersh, found them and the family was reunited. In the 1990s Roza moved to Israel and Anatoliy to the USA. On January 18, 1998, Yad Vashem recognized Ilya and Vassa Yanus, and Saveli and Marfa Kaminski, as Righteous Among the Nations.