Tokarski Petro

Tokarskiy, Petro Petro Tokarskiy was a farmer, living with his teenaged daughter Nina in the village of Rastow, near the town of Turzysk, Wolyn District. His wife had passed away in 1935. From before the war, Petro was well acquainted with the Jewish Boymel family from Turzysk – parents and four children. They had a bakery and used to buy fruit from the villagers. Besides, their relative Leibl Opoliner, a carpenter, helped Petro build his house. With the German occupation, the life of the Jews of Turzysk changed drastically: their property was looted; people were taken from their homes and murdered without knowing what guilt they bore. Later they were concentrated in a ghetto that existed for nearly a year. During that period, one of the Boymels’ children, 16-year-old Shulem, would sneak out of the ghetto and go to Petro to ask for food for his family. On August 23, 1942, a Saturday morning, the Gestapo and their local helpers surrounded the ghetto and ordered its inhabitants to start marching in the direction of Kowel. But they were led only to big pits outside of town and murdered there. Only a few managed to flee, Shulem Boymel among them. He hid in a cornstack in the field until it became dark; from his hiding place he saw the ghetto burning. The boy then made his way to the village of Rastow and knocked on Petro Tokarskiy’s door. Petro hid him under the floor in a barn. Soon, Leibl Opoliner joined Shulem there. The two of them stayed in that hiding place for two months. At night, Petro would come to the barn, remove the cover and give them food. One night Ukrainian policemen appeared at the farm. Leibl, who saw them through the cracks in the barn, recognized them as his former classmates. He went out trying to talk to them but was shot on the spot. Shulem jumped out of the rear of the barn and ran away. The police interrogated Petro but he convinced them that the Jews had entered his barn without his knowledge. Shulem returned to Petro the nextday, but the latter was too afraid to accept him back since he, Petro, was now under police surveillance. Instead, he took the boy to the forest, helped him dig a deep hole, filling it with straw and leaves. Shulem got inside, and Petro covered the pit over. Shulem spent the winter of 1942–1943 there; once a week he would walk to Petro’s farm to get food, sometimes staying there for a few days. Once in a while Petro would bring a food supply to his hiding place. Before Christmas 1943, Ukrainians came to cut pine trees in the forest and one of them suddenly fell into Shulem’s hole. Shulem was scared to death and ran away; he realized that he could no longer stay in the same place. He came to Petro and stayed hidden in his home for a while, until one night they went together to search for the Soviet partisans. They were lucky in finding a group of partisans on a raid, 50 km away from their headquarters. Shulem was accepted into their ranks and fought the enemy until the liberation of the area in February 1944. After the war, Shulem went back to Turzysk but found no more Jews there. In 1945, he left Ukraine, spent four years in a DP camp in Germany and in 1949 settled in the U.S.A. In 2000, Sam (Shulem) Boymel revisited the Turzysk area and met his rescuer’s daughter, Nina. On December 12, 2008, Yad Vashem recognized Petro Tokaskiy as Righteous Among the Nations.