The Faith to Make It Through Adversity
- Michael Long
- Jan 18
- 5 min read
by Michael Long
[Originally published in the Winter 2026 issue of Mount Gretna Magazine. View the full issue to see this story in its designed layout, complete with additional images.]
Victor Bojko knows a long lifetime covers a lot of ground, some of it treacherous.
From the screened-in front porch of the two-story cottage he shares with Judy, his wife of 55 years, Victor’s life and surroundings appear idyllic: sunlight sifting through maples, squirrels casually surveying the woodscape, and stately blue jays stopping by the bird feeders to feast on peanuts the Bojkos buy from Costco.
The serene Mount Gretna Campmeeting retirement sustaining Victor’s later years could not be farther from the chaos of his youth, from which he is now three generations and more than 5,000 miles removed.
A quarter century into the new millennium, the mention of Auschwitz still conjures images of horror. World War II historians estimate that the German Army, between 1940 and 1945, deported 1.3 million people to the Auschwitz concentration camp in German-occupied Poland, of whom 1.1 million were killed, 90% of them Jews.
But 4-year-old Victor Bojko survived that camp, along with his 6-year-old brother, Paul, and his parents, Gregor and Charytyna (Zelynska) Bojko. (See contents page for a photo of the four family members.)
Several years before he died in 2023, Paul Bojko recorded an interview with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum detailing his experiences during the war. The recollections of Victor and Paul paint a picture of a harrowing childhood.
Born in a village outside Kremenchuk, in central Ukraine, the boys lived with their parents and grandparents in a typical countryside farmhouse made of stucco with a thatched roof. As peasant farmers, the members of the Bojko (pronounced “boy-co”) family were not Jewish, but Ukrainian Orthodox.
The family lived off the land and without electricity. They grew potatoes and wheat, which they threshed by hand. Victor recalls eating watermelon and cantaloupe in the summertime. Paul recalled digging potatoes and listening to the German and Russian armies battling in the distance.
In the summer of 1943, the war came to their doorstep. German soldiers loaded the Bojko family into trucks at gunpoint and shipped them to Auschwitz. The Nazis would force millions of foreign civilians, like the Bojkos, to work in their factories to replace German men who had been conscripted into military service.
“The Nazis were going to put us all in the furnace unless my parents worked for them in the factories,” Victor says.
At Auschwitz, the boys’ father worked as a carpenter, building new barracks like the ones the Bojkos stayed in. Their mother cleaned barracks.
The Bojkos would spend only a few months in Auschwitz — their ultimate destination was a work camp in Nuremberg, Germany — but it was enough time to know something awful was happening there.
Paul recalled watching an officer shoot a man, who ended up dead in a ditch. Victor remembers the smell of death and the sniping of the German guards: “Schnell, schnell, schweinehund!” (“Faster, faster, you dirty dog!”)
When the Bojkos and other families with those capable of working were finally rounded up into cattle cars to be shipped by rail to Germany, the boys’ grandparents were forced to stay behind and were presumably killed. They never saw them again.
In Nuremberg, the boys fended for themselves while their parents worked in the factories. British and American forces bombed the city day and night.
Victor recalls hearing the whistling of the bombs and becoming inured to the fear the sound should have awakened in him. He remembers putting his head in a barrel during an air raid and getting shrapnel in his backside. And he recalls the strength of his mother.
“When we were running from shelter to shelter, she would take Paul under one arm and me under the other, and she would take us to safety someplace.”
When the war ended in 1945, the Bojkos found refuge in a Red Cross camp for displaced people. The cold, fear, and hunger that plagued the boys for two years receded, but trials of a different type awaited them.
Both of their parents took ill. Charytyna had a stroke and was bedridden in a hospital, and Gregor died of illness in 1947. That year, the boys were sent to the International Children’s Center at Prien am Chiemsee, Germany, and the following year, they moved to the International Refugee Organization Children’s Village in Bad Aibling, Germany, where they remained until it closed in 1951.
Victor recounts his time at Bad Aibling with great fondness. Run by an international collection of house parents, including Americans, the orphanage was well supplied, and the boys wanted for nothing. They had plenty of food, clothing, and even a dog, Pipsy.
In particular, Victor had comic books, which he adored. He read Hopalong Cassidy, Gene Autry, and
Roy Rogers comics.
Left to their own devices in the German countryside, the boys would explore tunnels dug during the war. They would take the guns and ammo they found to an ammunition dump and trade them in for a few Deutsche Marks, which they spent on pastries at the bakeries in town.
When the orphanage closed, Victor and Paul, ages 12 and 14, and another pair of brothers the same age were placed unsupervised on a ship headed for America. The sailors took care of the boys, who found ways to amuse themselves. Occasionally, Victor says, they would lean over the railing and pretend to be seasick so sympathetic passengers would give them extra
lunch tickets.
Pulling into New York Harbor, they could make out the Statue of Liberty in the distance and buildings dozens of stories high, the likes of which they had never seen.
In the city, “our heads were up all the time,” Victor says, and their feet were safely on the ground in America.
The boys stayed briefly at a Jewish center in New York before being placed with foster families around Baltimore. Their mother, having recovered from her stroke, came to America, too, and settled near Lebanon, which is how Victor came to the area to start his own life.
Victor’s road to Mount Gretna was long, circuitous, and fraught with peril.
“When I think about what happened,” Victor says, “there’s one of two ways you can make it through: Have faith enough that you can do it, or else you give up and say … ‘I’m just going to sit here and take what’s coming.’”
Victor chose faith, and that faith paid dividends.
Michael Long is the deputy editor of the Investigations and Enterprise team for LNP | LancasterOnline and WITF. He and his family hail from northern Lancaster County and still frequent Mount Gretna.
