Yakov Petrovich Batyuk

Yakov Petrovich Batyuk was born on 12 May 1918 in the village of Ryzhany in Volyn province, into a peasant family. In early childhood an accident left him completely blind. He nonetheless finished secondary school, entered the law faculty of Kyiv University, qualified as a lawyer in 1940 and was posted to Chernihiv region as an advocate of the Nizhyn city bar, where he quickly earned the respect of his colleagues and of the town. He was not a soldier. He held no rank and belonged to no unit, and those fields are empty in this record because filling them would be untrue. Nizhyn was occupied on 13 September 1941. In the occupied town Batyuk built an underground organisation. Its first and longest operation was based on the very trade the occupation authorities commissioned from it: the group took orders for horse harness and treated the finished rope work with a chemical solution Batyuk devised. When the harness grew wet with rain or with the horses' sweat, the solution irritated the animals' skin and put them out of service. About nine thousand sets were made this way. When the workshop was to be merged into other enterprises, removing its independence — and with it the chance to continue — Batyuk organised a protest by the workers and was dismissed from his post. He then widened the underground work. Learning of a partisan detachment in the woods near Nizhyn, in March 1942 he met its commander, Stratilat, secretary of the Nosovka underground party committee, after which the organisation took up propaganda work among the population. Over its existence it sent nearly sixty people to the partisans, among them fifteen prisoners of war who worked in a German hospital. The Gestapo picked up the group's trail, and on 25 August 1943 most of its members, Batyuk among them, were arrested; only a small group got out of the town. On the night of 6-7 September 1943 all twenty-six of those arrested were taken by two lorries to the railway station and shot by a ruined water tower. Nizhyn was liberated on 15 September, eight days later. Yakov Batyuk was twenty-five. The bodies of those shot were reinterred in a common grave at the Central (Trinity) cemetery in Nizhyn. He was made a Hero of the Soviet Union posthumously by decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of 8 May 1965, twenty-two years after his death. A street in Nizhyn and the Kyiv house of culture of the Ukrainian Society of the Blind carry his name; a Yakov Batyuk street and lane existed in Kyiv from 1965 until 1981. In Nizhyn there is a bust of him, a plaque on the house that held the group's headquarters, and a memorial sign at the place where they were shot. His sculpted portrait appears on the memorial to the staff and students of Kyiv University who died in the war. He appears in the film The Underground Party Committee Is Operating (1978) and is the central figure of Day Follows Night (1984).