Miasnykova Oleksandra

Oleksandra Miasnykova lived with her young son and mother in Haysyn in Vinnytsia region. Her husband was at the front since the beginning of the German-Soviet war. On July 10, the Nazis occupied the city of Haysyn, and the persecution of the Jewish population began almost immediately. In the summer, the Jews were ordered to move to the ghetto, which was organized on the street of Robitnycha. The occupiers staged the first mass shooting on September 16, having killed about 1,400 people in the Belendiika tract. The second massacre took place a month later. In total, more than 4 thousand of their tribesmen were executed in the autumn of 1941, and the executions continued until May 1942. A camp was organized near the town of Haysyn, where thousands of Jews deported from Bessarabia and Bukovina were held. They were used as labor forces for the construction of a bridge on the way to Vinnytsia and a highway in Uman. Most of these slaves died during the work, the rest ones were shot. To the southeast of the town of Haysyn, in the forest, there is a place of execution and burial of more than 300 Jews from the Nemyrivskyi and Bershadskyi districts.

During the days of the mass shootings, Jews tried to save their children by turning to Ukrainians for help. The Jewish woman Zinaida Shkrabii brought her six-year-old daughter Olenka to her old friend Oleksandra Miasnykova and asked her to hide her. For the neighbors, Oleksandra invented a story that the girl is her orphaned niece, and Zinaida helped with the acquisition of false documents, thanks to which she went to work in Germany. Zinaida returned to Ukraine in 1945 and was grateful to her friend for saving her daughter's life until the end of her life.

During the occupation, Oleksandra Miasnykova hid another Jewish girl – one and a half year old Lidiia Holdschmidt. Her mother Mariia Holdschmidt, in order to save herself, joined the partisans, and on the advice of her friends, threw her daughter into Olexandra's house.

Both Jewish girls survived and, despite their young age, remembered their rescuer. In the 1990s, as adults, they immigrated to the United States and immediately testified about her feat.

In 1995, Yad Vashem recognized Oleksandra Miasnykova as the Righteous Among the Nations.