Laikovska Olena and Volodymyr Lebediev

Sonia Donner was born and lived in Lviv. In the early summer of 1941, when Sonia was less than 14 years old, her parents sent her to a children's sanatorium in Zalishchyky, Ternopil region. During the first days of the war, children from the sanatorium were evacuated to the east. At the end of June 1941, they arrived in the resort town of Berdyansk, Zaporizhzhia region, on the Sea of ​​Azov. There Sonia met Olena Laikovska, a doctor from sanatorium. She took care of the children who came from Lviv. Some of them couldn’t speak Russian properly, and Dr. Laikovska, a Polish woman, understood them better than other doctors.

On October 7, 1941, German troops occupied Berdyansk (old name – Osypenko). The Germans deported about 11,500 inhabitants of the city to Germany. More than 6,000 citizens were tortured and shot. The place of mass extermination of locals was Merlikova Balka, where before the war a sanatorium for children of NKVD workers was located. The Nazis turned it into a POW camp.

Before the Nazis arrived, the Berdyansk sanatoriums were used as hospitals for Soviet wounded soldiers, and the children were transferred to a local orphanage.

In August 1941, the orphanage was evacuated inland of the USSR. Among a few children who were left in the city was Sonia Donner. Doctor Laikovska offered the girl to stay in her family. Olena Laikovska and her husband Volodymyr Lebediev wanted to officially adopt Sonia, but the registry office had lack of the necessary forms. That's why she received a birth certificate, according to which Sonia became a Pole, Sofiia Laikovska.

Volodymyr Lebediev, like his wife, also worked as a doctor. They both treated Sonia as their own daughter and loved her no less than their son Edik, who was 5 years old in 1941. They were sure that they, as doctors, would be evacuated to the east with their children if needed.

But everything had happened otherwise, and on October 7, 1941, the family found themselves under occupation. As Sonia lived at the Lebediev’s place relatively recently, there was a danger that the neighbors would be interested in her origins and could denounce them. To avoid the risks, during the whole period of the occupation the girl was not allowed to go outside in daylight hours. The new parents took care of her by themselves, taught her to read and write in Russian, as the girl did not know how to do it before. She went to school only after the expulsion of the Nazis from the city in September 1943.

When in the summer of 1944 Soviet troops seized the western regions of Ukraine, Sonia sent a request to Lviv about the fate of her parents. In response, she was informed that Solomon and Vita Donner no longer live at the former address. According to neighbors, it became known that at the beginning of the German occupation they were taken to the ghetto, and no one knew about their further fate. So Sonia stayed with her rescuers. Soon, they officially adopted her. She graduated from school, medical institute, and became an endocrinologist. From 1946 Sofiia Donner (married name – Uholieva) lived in St. Petersburg. Her foster father died in 1984, and her foster mother in 1993.

In 2004, Sofiia Donner found her paternal cousins ​​in Israel with the help of Yad Vashem. For all these years they were convinced that Sonia died in Lviv together with her parents.

On January 14, 2007, Yad Vashem awarded Olena Laikovska and Volodymyr Lebediev the honorary title of "Righteous Among the Nations."