OTTAWA – One thing the officials at Yad Vashem never tire of doing is naming deserving non-Jews Righteous Among the Nations.

“So far we have given this title to 22,757 people in 44 countries,” explained Yaron Ashkenazi, the executive director of the Canadian Society for Yad Vashem, during a ceremony recently at the Israeli embassy in Ottawa.

The event was to add one more person to the list.

The internationally renowned Holocaust education centre and museum recognized the heroism of Ukrainian Martin Vitiuk of Lvov, who, with tremendous risk to his own life, hid three Jewish men from the Nazi occupiers between June 1943 and March 1944. The men saved were Leib Blaustein, Benyo Ponikwer and  Kalman Harnik.

Mill manager Vitiuk himself was murdered in 1946, but his grandson Vladimir Muryne, 68, an architect who immigrated to Canada in 1998, along with his architect wife Valentina were at the embassy to receive the honour, which included a plaque and a medal.

Israeli Ambassador Miriam Ziv said she was proud and honoured to present the tribute.

“Israel takes this issue very seriously,” she said. “We ask why does a person do this thing at such great risk? For one reason only. Because of a good heart and good will. Many non-Jews sacrificed their lives and safety to help Jews. They are heroic.”

Ashkenazi added that such heroes did not risk their lives for a moment or an hour. Sometimes they did their life-threatening deeds for years and years. “Why? Because it was right. It was the moral thing to do.”

He also noted that to be recognized as a Righteous Among the Nations, a person must pass through a rigorous evidentiary process.

In the case of Vitiuk, some old letters were evidence enough. In 1944, after the Soviet army liberated Lvov, the grateful rescued Jews, who had moved to Israel, sent two letters of thanks. One was written in Yiddish, the other in Ukrainian.

As Muryne explained to the small gathering at the embassy, his son, Andrij, who moved to Ottawa more than 10 years ago, recognized the accent of one of his customers where he worked as a car mechanic. The two began to chat and Andrij realized the man, Stefan Moldovan, was a Ukrainian Jew. Moldovan had also been rescued and sheltered by a heroic neighbour during the war.

 Andrij told his new friend about his great-grandfather’s experience and asked Moldovan to read and translate the Yiddish copy that his grandmother cherished. It was Moldovan who contacted Yad Vashem to see about recognizing Vitiuk posthumously. The rest, as they say, is history.