Gaiduk Stepan & Juzefa

Gaiduk, Stepan Gaiduk, Yuzefa The farmers Stepan and Yuzefa Gaiduk and their four children lived in the village of Radowicze, Wolyn District. They worked their own plot of land and raised bees. Stepan was acquainted with the Jewish Miller family, from the neighboring town of Poryck; the Millers were cattle dealers and visited Radowicze once in a while for business. After the start of the German occupation, a ghetto was established in Poryck on June 23, 1941. Its inmates were the 3,000 Jews from Poryck and the vicinity. The ghetto was not fenced, although guarded; every day the able-bodied were taken to various physical worksites, mostly outside of town. In that period, the brothers Haim and David Miller made an arrangement with Stepan Gaiduk, that when the need would arise, they’d come to hide at his place. During the ghetto’s liquidation that started on September 1, 1942 and lasted four days, David Miller did not manage to escape. Only Haim reached the Gaiduks’ home, bringing with him another escapee, Semeon Tessler. Stepan and Yuzefa welcomed and hid them. Neither the neighbors nor the Gaiduks’ children knew about the two Jewish men hiding on the hayloft. It took almost one month until the searches for runaways (there were dozens) subsided. Haim and Semeon then parted from their rescuers and headed to the forest, looking for partisans. They parted ways: Semeon was accepted into the Soviet partisan group under the command of I. Shitov. He introduced himself as an Armenian and did not reveal his true identity to his comrades until the end of the war. Haim hid for some time in the forest, but was then captured by the Germans and sent to a labor camp. For many months he was forced to load bags of grain from the local harvest onto railway cars. He was lucky to be able to make another escape and finally linked up with partisans. After the liberation of the area in January 1944, Haim was drafted into the Red Army and served in the infantry until the end of thewar. Upon returning to Poryck, he found out that he was the only survivor of his family. Haim married a local Jewish woman and started his way to the West that ended in Canada in 1949. Semeon Tesser resided in Luck (Lutsk) until his immigration to Israel in 1990. Haim and Stepan exchanged letters for some time. In 2007 Haim’s son, Theodore Miller, came to Ukraine and found the rescuers’ offspring still living in the same village. On December 26, 2010, Yad Vashem recognized Stepan and Yuzefa Gaiduk as Righteous Among the Nations.