Lushcheieva Hanna and Olga, Altynnykova Hanna

Once at night, in the autumn of 1941, someone knocked on the door of Hanna Lushcheieva. The woman, her daughter Olga and stepsister Hanna Altynnykova lived in the semi-basement in Kyiv, on 46 Turgenevska Street. Due to the curfew, the windows were curtained. Opening the one, Hanna saw the girl Henia Batasheva. She immediately opened the windows. First Henia, then another girl Mania Palti fell on the floor. Their first words were: “All ours are shot dead”.

Yet in the morning, Hanna Lushcheieva and her family saw off their neighbors Batashevs going to the Babyn Yar area. Their families were friends. They lived poorly, but always shared a loaf of bread. Therefore, when in late September 1941, the order on the obligatory gathering of the Jews was published, their families decided to stay close. Olga Lushcheieva accompanied her friends as far as the Lukianivskyi Market. There were Rakhil Batasheva, her twin daughters Liza and Henia, son Hryhorii. Next to them the Palti family was going: Ester with her children Mania, Hrysha and little Polina.

Nobody imagined that the slaughter would start in a few hours. All they hoped it was just resettlement to a different area, the ghetto. However, until dark, only two girls had miraculously survived.

“I lost mom, Liza and Hrysha. The crowd pushed me, I ran, cried, called, fell exhausted by the endless hits. I did not want to believe that I would never see my family. And the infernal bacchanalia went on around: someone hit own head in hysteria, feeling no physical pain anymore, losing mind, some woman cradled dead baby, her hair got so white as snow, but she still hugged the breathless body to her chest and whispered: “Sleep, my son, sleep”. I found neither mom nor Hrysha. In the crowd, I saw 13-year-old Mania, our neighbor in the house. She was also searching for her family: mom, brother, sister. Her family also rests in the Babyn Yar. So teen, naive and beautiful, we did not want to die. “We don’t look like the Jews”, I whispered to Mania, “What if we tell the police that we were accompanying the Jews from our yard?”. And a miracle happened. Our cleverness saved both our lives. Blonde, blue-eyed, we did not cause suspicion among the Germans”. From the memories of Henia Batasheva

The girls said they were cousins and were believed. Henia, naive and honest, told her real address to the German officers, so they took her home by car.

At night, nobody was sleeping in the house of the Lushcheiev family. In the morning, the motorcycle with the Germans came to their house. They were searching for the girls. Hanna Altynnykova immediately decided what to do: she hid the girls’ clothes and locked Henia and Mania in the cell. Nobody told the Germans that they knew the girls or their location.

Since that day, Hanna Altynnykova became a contact person and food provider. It was extremely difficult, as they lived in the communal flat. They tried to behave in a way so that no one among the neighbors could suspect anything.

All this time, Mykola Soroka, the member of the partisan unit, lived near his family. He attentively watched the family and tried to save them once. On September 29, Mykola warned the Batashev family not to go to the Babyn Yar, as he wanted to clarify whether it was safe.

In the autumn of 1943, he knew that the frontline was getting closer. He worried that the Germans could easily discover the girls in the chaos of the fights, so he brought two documents certifying that the girls were sisters Halyna and Maria Kovalchuk. “Uncle Kolia” told the girls to move from Kyiv to the Kharkiv direction and cross the front. They were given some clothes, money and the map of Ukraine torn off the school atlas, on which the man marked the way. Unfortunately, Mykola did not survive the war: he was killed by the Germans the same year.

The fathers of Henia and Mania served in the Red Army and searched for their families. After the liberation of Kyiv, the daughter of Hanna Lushcheieva, Olga, helped them and their children find each other. For many years after the war, the girls had been friends and called each other sisters. Even the borders did not disrupt their warm relations: Olga Lushcheieva-Rozhchenko stayed in Ukraine, while Henia lived in Israel and Mania in the USA.

On February 6, 1992, Yad Vashem honored Hanna Lushcheieva, her sister Hanna Altynnykova and daughter Olga Lushcheieva-Rozhchenko as the Righteous Among the Nations. Olga worked all her life for commemoration of the perished in those horrible days. She became the Head of the Babyn Yar Righteous Association at the Jewish Council of Ukraine. In 2006, the woman received the Order “For Merit” of the 3rd class.