Today, an unusual guest is visiting the Thiya Community Center. A former resident of our city, and now the capital, Petro Dyukov, visited the Holocaust Memorial Museum. His interest in this place is not limited to ordinary curiosity. On the memorial wall, where the names of the missing Proskuriv residents are immortalized, there is one special "brick". Rakhshmir Yesfir - that was the name of the writer's mother. After the terrible catastrophe that befell the Jews in World War II, this "brick" is the only thing that, besides a bright memory, remained from man to future generations.
Petro Dyukov told information manager Vyacheslav Nagnibida the difficult story of his childhood. He was saved from a bad fate by evacuation to Samarkand, where an orphanage became his new home. His mother was unable to leave the occupied territory. Her fate is unknown, but she is not listed as dead in archival materials. That is why her name was engraved on the wall of the missing.
The fate of Petro Dyukov was good. After forced emigration, he studied and returned to Ukraine. He worked and used his creative potential as a writer. He edited a book for the anniversary of "Ukrzaliznytsia", but the main book of his life is "Samarkand, the Blue Sky". This is a story about wartime childhood, about a distant city and staying in an orphanage, the cause of which was the aggression of the fascist occupiers.
Once the book was printed in a small edition. Several copies were donated by the author to the library of the Khmelnytskyi Charitable Foundation “Hesed Besht”. However, over time, the text of the book was supplemented and clarified, enriched with information about the people who were then with Petr Dyukov in the boarding house. Reprinting the book is currently expensive for the author, and he also cannot find patrons. But the man does not lose hope – perhaps one day the supplemented edition will still see the light of day.
