The war that could not destroy goodness and humanity: a different perspective that changes stereotypes

German Fogel had a difficult choice. If she hadn't let the Ukrainian young man, who was being sought by the Gestapo, into her house, he would have been inevitably shot. Or if she had let him, she might have been exposed and ended up in prison.

Frau Vogel decided to take a risk and save the boy's life.

The winter of 1942 was raging outside. World War II was raging in the world. And the disagreement with the policies of the Nazi leadership was raging in the hearts of many German families living in the city of Sokal in Western Ukraine.

Fogel hated war. The war took her husband and her son. They were mobilizeddied by the then German authorities and died in World War I.

At the end of the first war in her life, Fogel moved to Ukraine with her parents.

It was probably God's choice to place on her the heavy burden of saving Ukrainian youth decades later.

The first was Maksym. He was detained by German soldiers and Gestapo officers to be sent to forced labor in Germany. There was the way for all the young and physically healthy population from the villages and towns adjacent to Sokal.

Maksym was transported together with his fellow villagers in freight cars of numerous trains to a transit prison in Lviv .

Here the young man saw barracks, barbed wire, and sentries on towers for the first time.

Maksym organized the escape of his fellow villagers. He walked to Sokal through forests and fields in bitter frost.

There was no way to his native village of Pozdymyr - he would have been immediately arrested there. As the organizer of the escape he might have been shot.

One of his classmates from the railway school in Kamianka-Buzka, where they had managed to study a year before the war, lived in Sokal.

But his friend did not dare to hide him at his place.

- You need to hide in a place that will be searched last. On the outskirts of the city there is a house of an old German woman. Her parents are dead. She is alone. Go towards the village of Potorytsia. At the exit from Sokal, the last house is hers, - said the classmate.

Three o'ckloc in the morning. Sixty-five-year-old Vogel made her choice as soon as she let the frozen, ragged, hungry and all covered in wounds Maxim into her house.

Frau gave him a roof over his head, treatment and food for the next year.

To justify his living in the house, she began renting out other rooms to students. Their parents collaborated with the German administration, so Fogel protected herself from inspections.

Maxim had his own separate entrance, so during the year of hiding he never crossed paths with other inmates.

Fogel not only hid the young man. She began to teach Maxim German. So it could help him rescue in the future.

The German woman spent most of her savings to pay bribes and to get German documents for Maxim.

After a year, knowing the language and having the necessary papers, Maxim was able to move freely around the city and earn money from part-time jobs.

Later, Vogel hid other local young men who were searched by the Gestapo.

Maxim knew about five of them. How many there were is still unknown.

Thus, risking her life, a German woman saved Ukrainians from death and concentration camps. This was one of the cases of extraordinary humanity and a kind of protest against the cruel war of extermination. Not all Germans supported the Nazi regime. Not all were invaders and aggressors.

By chance, Maxim found out his parents' serious illness from one of the villagers. He was hesitating for two days . On the third day, he went to the village with food and medicine. He had no relatives. Twenty kilometers to Pozdymyr and Maxim was already in his native house.

He managed to visit his parents six times. Knowledge of the language and documents purchased by Frau Fogel allowed the young man to pass German patrols.

But he was betrayed by one of the villagers. Maksim was shocked. The German woman, risking her life, saved him. And someone from the village reported him.

Many days of interrogation in the “black gendarmerie”. That was the name of the Gestapo prison in Sokal. The Germans demanded confasion who was hiding him.

Maksim withstood the torture. And he did not betray Fogel.

So he ended up in the Yaniv concentration camp in Lviv. His execution was a matter of time. But Maksim again organized an escape.

A frosty spring night in 1943. Maksim standed again in front of Frau Vogel.

The German woman could not take him in - her house was full of young people.

Frau took him to her friends. In Sokal she was not the only one who hid Ukrainians from the Gestapo.

Fogel took Maxim to the Schiller family house, above the Bug River, on the other outskirts of Sokal. Here he hid until the summer of 1944, when the Wehrmacht troops gave up .

The head of the Schiller family was originally from Frankfurt am Main. He also moved to Ukraine after the First World War. At that time his father was a German officer. The war took his life.

The Schillers were teachers and had two young daughters. By hiding a concentration camp escapee in his home, the German Schiller put at risk not only his own life, but also his wife's and two children's lifes.

To be human. A difficult choice in a cruel life. To risk your loved ones for saving strangers people. A difficult choice, a difficult life position. Every day more than one German family made a choice to save Ukrainians. The world during the war was not black and white. Numerous examples of humanity confirm this.

Frau Fogel and the Schiller family left Sokal with the German troops, during the retreat in the summer of 1944. They were afraid of persecution by the NKVD repressive machine.

- They returned to Germany. I have tried to find them since the declaretion of Ukraine independence. But I did not succeed, - Maksym Savka ended his story.

I met him in Sokal in 2017. Maksym Vasilyevich was 93 years old at that time. Five children. Eight grandchildren. Four great-grandchildren. They all owe their lives to a few Germans who saved their father, grandfather and great-grandfather from Nazi execution.

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German Bauer Otto Went rescued two French soldiers from German captivity. He also helped Ukrainian Ostarbeiters. The famous rich man from the village of Mattstedt, in the Weimar region, was respected by the entire local Nazi administration. However the German elderly man dared to show his attitude to the bloody war of extermination by such an act.

The story of Otto Went was told to me by Olga Mysyshyn from the town of Drohobych in the Lviv region, when I was collecting stories of Ukrainians who managed to survive forced labor in Germany.

At the age of four, she, her younger sister and parents were forcibly taken to forced labor. In 1942, the villages in the Drohobych region were surrounded by police and German troops for several days. The young residents were detained and herded into freight cars under escort. Everyone was taken away from the village of the Mysyshyn family – Dorozhiv, except the elderly.

In Germany, the Mysyshyn family was assigned to work by the local administration to Otto Went. This elderly man and his daughter Maritza Went asked the local authorities to send the family with young children to them. Because Maritza had her own story of opposition to the war.

More than a year had passed since her husband was forcibly mobilized by the Nazis. The last letters from him came from the Eastern Front, somewhere in Ukraine. Maritza Vent never found out when and where her husband died. The war unleashed by the Nazis took away a father from a small child, Maritza's son.

That is why both the woman and Otto Vent wanted a Ukrainian family with small children.

Officially, Olga Mysyshyn's parents were forced laborers.

But the Vent family treated them as equals. Otto's wife, Maritza, and Agafia Mysyshyn (Olia's mother) cooked food for the workers together. They also did all the housework together. They celebrated together, went to church together and rested together.

Maritza's son played with Olya and her sister. They had common toys.

The Mysyshyn and Otto families lived in neighboring houses.

Otto Vent paid Ukrainians for his work with food. Agafia sold food and exchanged it for clothes in neighbouring villages.

So the forced Ukrainian Ostarbeiters were actually hired workers, receiving payment for their work. But both Otto and Maritza repeatedly reminded Olya's parents that they could not talk about it. If Nazis had known about this, they would have thrown the German owners into prison immediately.

In the summer of 1944, a column of prisoners of war stopped on the central road of the village of Mattstedt. More than a thousand prisoners lay down along the entire village. Several dozen German soldiers guarded the beginning and the end of the column. They stood along the column.

The road was along the fence of Otto Vent's houses.

From the very morning, Maritza and Agafia peeled and cooked potatoes and other food for the prisoners. Otto and Olya's father, Mykhailo, distracted the German guards with conversations. At that time, a Ukrainian girl and a German boy – Vent's grandson, girded with rockers with food, got through holes in the fence between the house and the road and handed food to prisoners of war.

The German and Ukrainian family's work continued all day.

When it got dark, the German soldiers's shout set the prisoners on the road.

Olya remembers that Otto Went and her father immediately left the houses and got through the fence into the darkness.

They returned when it was dawn outside.

Several decades later, already in free Ukraine, Olya's father told her that night Otto Went with him managed to lead two French officers out of the column and hide them in the forest.

For several days, while the former prisoners of war were hiding, Maritza Went prepared food for them and secretly carried it to the forest beside Otto Went's fields.

Later, the old German led the French through the forests, bypassing the German outposts behind the front line.

Humane attitude towards Ukrainian Ostarbeiters, organization of escape of prisoners. For such things the Nazis would have sent to a concentration camp immediately entire German family. But the old German farmer took a risk.

- Now, when I know that the public will find out about the actions of the Went family, I will die peacefully, - told me Olga Mysyshyn, an olderly women from the small town of Drohobych in the Lviv region. She wants Otto Went's descendants to be proud of their grandfather's behavior during World War II.

…

I have planned to highlight these stories of preserving humanity for a long time, despite the difficult times of war.  This idea came to me many years ago, on one of the difficult evenings in the hospital with my grandmother. She told me the war story of her youth.

Halyna Shun – that was my grandmother’s name. She was born and raised in the village of Olesko, 70 kilometers from Lviv.

She managed to survive the Second World War. To survive it in Ukraine. My grandmother escaped from forced deportation to Germany. An officer saved the eighteen-year-old girl from forced labor and an unknown future. A German officer. A few hours before the round-up of young people in Olesko,  in the middle of the night, a German soldier came to my grandmother’s parents’ house, thereby saving her from forced deportation.

Then, on Sunday night, Galyna Shun and her aunt escaped to Lviv, where they hid during the following years of the war, working underground as seamstresses.

Although this German was an officer, he was forcibly mobilized into the army by the Nazis. In 1941, his daughter turned 18. Although he raised the child alone, his wife had died, on the day his daughter came of age, he was forcibly sent to the front.

Since the summer of 1941, German soldiers had been stationed in the Olesko area. The forty-year-old officer had repeatedly helped Halyna's family. Mostly with food.

Such affection was not connected with love. During his first visit to the family, the officer showed Galyna's parents a worn black-and-white photo. The girl on the foto was similar to Halyna Shun. Actualy it was his daughter.

That's why he was so concerned about the fate of the Ukrainian girl.

The officer warned her and saved her from forced deportation. What would have happened to the soldier if the German command had found out about this? State treason, betrayal of the swear, collaborationism, deprivation of rank, prison or concentration camp. His daughter would have been branded in Germany - as the child of a traitor. Would he have seen her, would he have survived imprisonment?

And what happened to that officer? Did he survive the war and return to his child?

The grandmother never found out about it. But she often prayed that God would protect the German's daughter.

This story of mutual aid illustrates another view of World War II. Which destroys the standard stereotype of the division into "bad" and "good". The division of the interpretation of history exclusively as a "white" and "black" side.

This is a view of the war, in which there was a place for help, mutual aid, manifestations of Great deeds of Little People. When representatives of the warring camps saved the lives each others. They risked to lose their own life for saving others.

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- Our good deeds will definitely come back to us from others, - Anna Taratylo tells me.

During World War II, her family in the village of Velyka Bilyna in the Sambir region of Lviv region hid three Jews from the Germans. A father and his two sons. For three months, Ukrainians risked being sent to a concentration camp for hiding Jews. Taratyls placed them in the attic, fed them and looked after them.

Mrs. Anna recalled that they were afraid to tell their fellow villagers and even neighbors or relatives about the Jews. The closest people could betray them.

- Goodness returns, - the woman repeats.

After the war, she, together with her mother and grandparents, were exiled to Siberia. The Soviet authorities subjected Taratyls to repressions because her father was a rebel, fighting in the ranks of the UPA against the Soviet Union.

In exile Taratyly were saved by German Rutch, who settled them in his house.

Taratyls saved strangers Jews. German Rutch saved strangers Ukrainians. Selfless help. Humanity. Help.

One of the most famous dramatic stories of the rescue of Jews by Ukrainians happened in Boryslav. A small town in the Lviv region, famous for its oil, is known to many in Israel. Because among the Jews saved during the war was Shevah Weiss, who later became the speaker of the Israeli Knesset.

Myroslava Lepka recalled and told me about those turbulent events.

Her mother Rozaliya and aunt Pavlina Shchepanyuk were able to hide two families, the Goebbels and Weiss, for two years. In total, 20 Jews were saved.

Aunt Pavlina had a large house above the river. A stable for livestock. And a large cellar. Ukrainians buried twenty Jews in this cellar.

Myroslava Lepka was four years old at that time, her brother Zenyk was three years older.

The children had a significant role in saving the Jews. They were a kind of guards - sentries. During the day, the children played in the yard. And when they saw German soldiers walking along the road or entering or leaving neighboring houses - little Myrosya would give the elders a sign - she would knock on the metal horizontal bar near the cellar with an iron pipe. And she would shout loudly - “Zenyk - don’t touch me”. For her mother and aunt, this was a signal that German soldiers or police were nearby. Therefore, you could neither enter nor leave the cellar.

To disguise themselves, her mother and aunt flooded the first room of the cellar - so there was always water there. Several times, German soldiers and even Gestapo officers came to check. But when they saw that the cellar was knee-deep in water - they didn’t look any further.

And then, after passing the water, there was a turn and a corridor on an elevation. Accordingly, it was dry here. The corridor ended with two large rooms. This is where the Jews lived. Mattresses, bedding, dishes.

Pits were dug in the floor, firewood was burned to keep warm. Myroslava and her brother brought firewood. They had another task - to change the bedding twice a month. When the children left the cellar, they disguised themselves not to be too noticeable, they wrapped themselves in the bedding - as playing in ghosts. They used the same method to bring clean bedding to the cellar.

Aunt Pavlina had her own store. So buying food in large quantities did not arouse suspicion from the German administration.

- I screamed, Zenyk - don't move me. I screamed very loudly because I was afraid. At any moment we could be discovered. My mother, aunt and us, the little children, would have been sent to a concentration camp. And our fun would have come to an end, - recalls Myroslava Lepka.

Her family managed to survive that terrible war and saved the lives of 20 Jews.

They managed to get their own small victory.

Like the other heroes whose stories I described. The Germans saved Ukrainians, Ukrainians saved Jews. The terrible war crushed millions of lives and destinies. But it could not overcome humanity, mutual assistance and mutual support, which was showed by civilians and military.

They were able to oppose violence, murder and suffering thanks to their belief in goodness and the desire to help their neighbors despite the horrors of war.

30.12.2025,

Taras Zozulinskyy