Buryachok Vera

Buryachok, Vera Vera Buryachok lived alone on a khutor close to the town of Timashevsk, in the Krasnodar district. She worked on the Pobeda kolkhoz. Most of her relatives had been exiled to Siberia in the early 1930s, when the prosperous farming class was purged. Her husband had died at a young age, and her only son had severed all ties with her. The Germans occupied the area in mid August 1942, and shortly afterward, Buryachok heard about a 5-year-old Jewish boy, who had been evacuated from Leningrad and got lost. He was brought to the khutor by a young orphanage worker from the Novoshcherbinovskaya settlement, and left with one of the local families. But the family paid little attention to their young ward: he wandered around the village all day, begging for food. Buryachok liked the boy, whose name was Genrikh (Gena) Gorfunkel, and invited him to stay with her, knowingly endangering her life by sheltering him. She cared for Gena as if he were her own son and the boy returned her affection. After the area was liberated, in the first half of February 1943, Buryachok adopted Gena officially, believing that his family members had not survived. However, in September that same year, Gena’s sister, Miriam Gorfunkel, suddenly appeared in the khutor. She had journeyed a long way in order to find her little brother, heading first to the orphanage in Novoshcherbinovskaya, where Gena had stayed for a short time before he was brought to the khutor. Only after Buryachok was convinced that Miriam was Gena’s sister and that their mother had also survived, did she part with her adopted son. Until Buryachok’s death, in 1955, the Gorfunkels visited her every summer and were forever grateful to her for rescuing their Genrikh. On December 22, 1997, Yad Vashem recognized Vera Buryachok as Righteous Among the Nations.