Vasyl Mykhailovsky

Vasyl Mykhailovsky (birth name Caesar Katz) was born in Kyiv on November 19, 1937.

Vasyl’s father, Petro Katz (1902-1941), was the director of a café on Khreshchatyk, and his mother, Tsypa Zilberstein, died when Vasyl was barely one year old. 

Before the war Vasyl lived with his father and brother Pavlo in a communal apartment at 9 Kostelna Street. The boy was raised by his nanny Anastasiia Fomina (Righteous Among the Nations).

At the beginning of the war Vasyl’s brother and other relatives were evacuated to Central Asia, and after the war they settled in Moscow. Vasyl and his nanny did not manage to evacuate from Kyiv. 

On September 29, 1941, Vasyl Mykhailovsky and Anastasiia Fomina joined a column of Jews heading for Babyn Yar. Having miraculously escaped death, they hid in the ruins of Kyiv for two weeks.

Anastasiia Fomina brought Vasyl to Predslavinska Street, where a shelter (orphanage No. 2) for homeless children was set up in the building of the former children’s hospital. She left the boy there with a note mentioning a made-up name “Vasya Fomin”. Vasyl Mykhailovsky lived in the orphanage from 1941 to 1945.

The orphanage was managed by a pediatrician, Nina Gudkova (Righteous Among the Nations). Together with other staff members she hid Vasyl and several other Jewish children during inspections conducted by the Germans during the years of the occupation of Kyiv.

In 1945 Vasyl was adopted by the doctor family of Mykhailovsky, Vasyl Ivanovich (Righteous Among the Nations) and Berta Savelivna. In 1957 Vasyl Mykhailovsky graduated from Pushkin School No. 153 with honours, and from 1957 to 1962 he studied at the Faculty of Construction and Technology of the Kyiv Construction Institute.

He worked on the construction of the Kremenchuk and Kyiv Hydroelectric Power Plants, designed gas and oil pipelines (including the Urengoy-Pomary-Uzhhorod gas pipeline), and in the 1990s headed the design and engineering technical bureau at the Research Institute of Construction Production of the State Construction of Ukraine.

Mykhailovsky was one of the founders of the organisation Zikaron Shoah (Memory of the Shoah) and was the deputy chairman and executive secretary of the All-Ukrainian Association of Jews – Former Prisoners of Ghetto and Nazi Concentration Camps.

On August 21, 2020, he was awarded the Order of Merit, second class, but unfortunately, he was unable to receive the award himself. His daughter, Olha Fesun, received the order. He died on September 8, 2020, after a lasting illness.