Sokolik Mikhail & Yekaterina ; Son: Ivan

Sokolik, Mikhailo Sokolik, Katerina Sokolik, Ivan Mikhailo Sokolik, a farmer, lived with his wife, Katerina, in the village of Borszczów, (today Borshchiv, L’viv District ). When the German-Soviet war broke out, Mikhailo was in his early 60s. Two of his daughters were married and living separately, but three younger children were still living at home. The area was occupied by German troops on July 1, 1941. Two years later, in June 1943, one early morning, Mikhailo found Sophia Pizem, a pre-war Jewish acquaintance, hiding in his barn, with her children, 13-year-old Rubin and eight-year-old Ida. They had survived the liquidation of the Przemyślany ghetto that took place on May 22, 1943, and which had lasted for one week, while staying inside a concealed bunker in the ghetto. Then, for nearly a month, they had wandered the rural regions around Przemyślany, desperately searching for a hiding place, but the local farmers were afraid to let them in. The Sokoliks were not only the first ones who let the Jewish family stay, but they also did not ask for any payment in return for their help. Mikhailo and his 23-year-old son, Ivan, dug a pit in the barn, padded it with straw on the inside and covered it over with wooden planks. The Pizems stayed in that place for more than three months, receiving their daily meals from Katerina or her young daughters. The hosts tried to encourage Sophia not to give up hope and consoled her in her grief – since the start of the persecutions she had lost her husband, Chaim Pizem-Wiederkehr, her daughter, Ester, her mother, Debora Turkish, and many other relatives. In spite of the many precautions that the Sokoliks took, their neighbors noticed that something about them was different and rumors began to spread that they were hiding someone. In order to prevent disaster, Mikhailo hurried to take the Pizems away from the village, and brought them to the woods of Czemerynci, where, as it was known, other Jews were hiding. The Pizems joined upwith the others and survived until the Red Army drove the Germans out of the area in July 1944. Sophia and her children stayed in Przemyślany (by then Peremyshliany), until 1956 and then left for Poland, only to resettle again in the U.S.A. in the 1960s. After their departure, contact with the Sokoliks was temporarily disrupted, but it was renewed in the late 1990s. On September 15, 2003, Yad Vashem recognized Mikhailo and Katerina Sokolik, and their son, Ivan, as Righteous Among the Nations.