Gumeniuk Adam & Yefrosinia (Yaremchuk); Sister-In-Law: Pilipchuk Marfa (Yaremchuk)

Gumenyuk, Adam Gumenyuk, Yefrosinya Yaremchuk (Pilipchuk), Marfa The orphaned Yaremchuk children, Yefrosiniya, Marfa and Vasiliy lived in poverty in the village of Karyshkov, Kopaigorod County, Vinnitsa District. On the eve of the war, the younger sister Yevdokiya married a fellow villager, Adam Gumenyuk, and moved to live in his home. The Germans and the Romanians occupied the area in July 1941, and the region soon became part of Transnistria and a Romanian detention camp was established in Karyshkov. Its inmates were Jews deported from Bessarabia and Bukovina. Several hundred people were accommodated in pigsties and other kolkhoz household buildings; they were forced to work, mostly in the fields, and were barely supplied with food. As winter approached, many of them started to die of exposure, hunger and diseases. In order to survive, inmates started going out the camp, although it was forbidden, in order to beg for alms from the locals. In 1942, the Yaremchuks were approached by the Jewish Libman family, originally from the town of Briceni (nowadays in Moldova). The head of the family, Leiba Libman, knew how to make hats; his wife Riva and the children Semeon, Buzya and Yakov, aged 20, 17 and 12, were ready to do any job for a piece of bread. The Yaremchuks shared their humble lunch with the Libmans and promised to help. Indeed, they managed to persuade some of their neighbors to order hats from Leiba Libman. The clients paid him with agricultural produce. Marfa Yaremchuk taught Buzya Libman to make paper flowers which the villagers liked, using them to decorate their homes. One day, Marfa and Vasiliy witnessed the arrest of another Jewish family in the house of their neighbor, Domka: the policemen beat the hostDomka was a woman and took the Jews away; nobody ever saw them again. Since then, the Libmans stopped coming to the Yaremchuks, but frequented the Gumenyuks’ house instead, situated on the other side of the village. As time passed, they wouldeven stay there occasionally for a night. The Gumenyuks’ had a spare room, warmed by the stove. It was there that the Libmans could bathe and wash their clothes for the first time in more than a year. Thanks to the support from the Yaremchuks and the Gumenyuks, the Jewish family of five survived until the liberation of the area in March 1944. Later that year, Adam Gumenyuk and Vasiliy Yaremchuk were sent to the front and both fell in battle. The Libmans returned to Moldavia and exchanged letters with Marfa (married name, Pilipchuk) and Yefrosiniya Gumenyuk. In the 1990s Buzya and Yakov Libman immigrated to the U.S.A. On February 2, 2010, Yad Vashem recognized Adam and Yefrosiniya Gumenyuk, as well as Marfa Yaremchuk (Pilipchuk) as Righteous Among the Nations.