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Herashchenko Tetiana, Pustova Halyna

Tetiana Herashchenko lived with her two teenage sons in the village of Parne in Dnipropetrovsk region, worked on the railway. In the fall of 1941, a Jewish woman with a one-and-a-half-year-old child knocked on her house and asked for help. Tatiana, like all local residents, was warned about the punishment that awaits those who save Jews. However, she could not leave a young woman with a tiny daughter on the street.

Having recovered from fatigue and fright, Frida told Tatiana her story. She lived with her husband in the Pokrovskyi district, both worked in a collective farm. With the beginning of the war, he was taken to the front, and she and little Zina remained in the occupation. Once a neighbor's boy Yurko Bratsylo ran to Frida and told her that the next day the Germans would gather the Jews. Therefore, she decided to run away to the neighboring village. Oleksiivka, where she was sheltered by Yurko's aunt. However, the raids began; the police searched the local residents day and night, suspecting that they were hiding Jews. The hostess asked Frida to leave her house, because she was very afraid for the lives of her relatives. Therefore, a Jewish woman with her daughter in her arms wandered from village to village in search of a new shelter. One night, she got on a freight train with coal, not even knowing where it was going, she decided to go everywhere. The train stopped at the station, near which stood a small house. That is how Frida Maiman and her daughter got to Tetiana Herashchenko.

Nevertheless, she sympathized with them, helped as much as she could. It was very cold in the house; there was not enough food, because Tetiana I also had to feed her two boys. Even little Zina fell ill. In the end, Tetiana decided to ask her neighbor Halyna Pustova for help.

Halyna was younger, also had two children: six-year-old Lonia and three-year-old Valia, kept a small farm. She agreed to accept Frida. From the spring of 1942 until the expulsion of the Nazis, a Jewish woman lived there with her daughter, helped with household chores, looked after the children.

In 1944, Frida and Zina returned home. Throughout their lives, they were friends with their saviors and their children.

In 2006, Yad Vashem recognized Tetiana Herashchenko and Halyna Pustova as Righteous Among the Nations.

Svitlana Demchenko

Kyiv

National museum of the History of Ukraine in the Second World War

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