Shirko Filip & Nadezhda

Shirko, Filip Shirko, Nadezhda Kondratiuk, Gordey Kondratiuk, Nadezhda Filip Shirko was a wealthy farmer who lived with his wife, Nadezhda, and their small children in the town of Stepan (today Stepan’, Rivne District). He had a small, isolated farmstead nearby surrounded by fields and fruit orchards. From the beginning of the German occupation in July 1941, the family spent most of their time at the farmstead and only rarely visited the town. One of Shirko’s acquaintances was Yosel Magid, the owner of a flourmill that was nationalized by the Soviet authorities in 1939, but which Magid continued to manage. During the German occupation, Magid continued his work at the flourmill and because of that he was not interned in the ghetto that was established in Stepan on October 5, 1941. However, his wife, Frieda, and his children, Hershel and Eliyahu, were relocated to the ghetto. On August 25, 1942, on the day when the ghetto residents were taken to be killed near Kostopol (now Kostopil’), Frieda and Eliyahu managed to escape. They found shelter with a non-Jewish friend. 12-year-old Hershel also succeeded in fleeing; he came to the flourmill where his father worked. Together the two ran to Shirko’s farmstead where they were received and hidden for nearly two weeks. Not knowing what happened to the rest of the family, they mourned for them. One day, Shirko learned that his neighbors had seen the Jews in his yard. Having no other choice, he asked the Magids to leave. They went to a nearby forest where, to their great joy, they met Frieda and Eliyahu. The four Jewish refugees got to the village of Volosha, where Yosel had a friend he could rely on. The friend agreed to hide them but only in exchange for money. The time they spent with him was unbearably difficult because they were supplied with very little food, it was very cold, and it was too narrow for the four of them. When their money was spent, he sent them away. In that same village, they found another familythat agreed to take them in without any payment. Gordey and Nadezhda Kondratiuk put the refugees into the hayloft and fed them. They also tried to look after their spiritual needs; each evening Gordey climbed up to the loft and read to them from the New Testament. A devout Christian, he secretly hoped that his preaching would convince the Jews to accept the “true religion,” but he never demanded it of them. In the summer of 1943, Stepan was occupied by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) that persuaded some Jewish tradesmen to return to the town to their previous employment. One of these was Yosel who took back the flourmill and began to live in the open. Six weeks before the town was liberated by the Soviets, ultra-nationalists of the UPA murdered him and several other Jews and threw their bodies into the Horyn River. The day after the liberation, in mid-January 1944, Frieda and her sons took leave of the Kondratiuk family. After the war they immigrated to the United States. Their rescuers, the Kondratiuk and Shirko families were exiled to Siberia; in the eyes of the Soviets, the Shirkos were too rich and the Kondratiuks were too religious. The survivors and their rescuers only managed to renew their contacts in the 1990s. On December 30, 2001, Yad Vashem recognized Filip and Nadezhda Shirko and Gordey and Nadezhda Kondratiuk, as Righteous Among the Nations.