Golda Vul née Stavskaya, her husband Akim, and her son Mikhail lived in Lemberg (Lviv) from 1939. After the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, the city became part of the government general established in Poland. The Red Army officer Akim Vul left the city, leaving Golda and their son behind.
The German journalist Erika Hutsch was allocated a room in their apartment, and the two women became friends. In November 1941 the German occupiers set up a ghetto in Lemberg, where all the city’s Jews had to move. Hutsch persuaded her friend not to do so. They moved into a different apartment together. Although it was generally known in the neighborhood that Golda Vul and her son were Jewish, they were not denounced. Hutsch left Lemberg shortly before the Red Army liberated the city on July 26, 1944. Golda Vul later learned that her husband had not survived.
More than 60 years after the end of the war, Mikhail Vul began searching for his former rescuer. Erika Hutsch was posthumously honored as Righteous Among the Nations by the Israeli Holocaust memorial center Yad Vashem in 2012.