Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, has recognized 2,673 Ukrainians as Righteous Among the Nations, an honor conferred on non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews.

Nataliia Mariichyn’s great grandparents, Grigoriy and Mariya Palivoda, were among the recipients. They saved Eliezer (Leizer) Buchwald, his sister Shloma and their mother, Berta Leiblich. Their story of courage and resilience emerges in Honor (Astra Books), a young adult book by Mariichyn, Buchwald and Susan McClelland.

Based on true events, but slightly altered to protect the privacy of the main characters, it unfolds through the dual perspectives of Mariichyn and Buchwald, and is set against the backdrop of World War II and contemporary Ukraine.

Honor is constructed around a discovery that changed Mariichyn’s life. In 2013, Mariichyn, an aspiring writer from the Ukrainian city of Ivano-Frankivsk, found a thick pile of letters on her desk left there by her grandmother, Katherine. “As I flipped through them, I could see some were handwritten and others typed,” she recalls.

They were composed by Buchwald and inspired by his experiences during the Nazi occupation of Ukraine, a period when hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian Jews were murdered by the Germans and local collaborators.

Buchwald, whose nick name was Leizer, was born in 1929 in Stanislawow, a Polish town in eastern Galicia that later........

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