National Perspective: Two families bound by goodness

COTE SAINT-LUC, Quebec — If you need proof of the Anne Frank dictum (“In spite of everything, I still believe people are really good at heart”) — if you doubt there is a poetry to paying it forward — if you wonder whether life can reveal a virtuous circle when on the cruel surface, it takes the form of a vicious circle — then linger for a moment on the story of Lucia Buchwald, who sold chickens and eggs in a tiny farm community overrun by the Nazis, and Nataliia Mariichyn, who this summer is living in an apartment here.

Lucia, her mother and her brother were hidden from the German invaders for two dangerous years in what today is Ukraine by a courageous family who, at great risk to themselves, harbored them under a black corrugated metal roof that covered a horse stable. More than three-quarters of a century later, as the Soviet storm sweeps through Ukraine, Nataliia has found refuge through the remarkable efforts of the very family her own relatives once saved.