Ponomarenko (Tatarka) Yevdokiia 

Yevdokiia Tatarka lived in the village of Preobrazhenne, Svatove district, Luhansk region. On the eve of the German-Soviet war, she worked on a local collective farm and took care of her 5-year-old daughter Zoia alone.

In June 1942, the region was occupied by German troops. The persecution began soon. The first victims of the occupiers were patients of the Svatove Psychiatric Hospital, 35 of whom were Jews. Another 30 Jews were shot later. The rumors about the shootings spread throughout the region.

In the fall of 1942, an unknown woman with two children appeared in the village. In the village commandant's office, she introduced herself as Ukrainian Mariia Pinchuk, although she did not have documents proving her identity. She said the documents had burned down along with all the property during the bombing and she was looking for a job and any shelter. The head of the village, Trokhim Kovalenko, allowed Mariia to stay in the village, provided her with an empty house, and offered her a job on a collective farm. Mariia's children, 16-year-old Sofiia and 7-year-old Volodymyr became friends with the local children and youth and it seemed there was no difference between them.

While working on the collective farm, Mariia became friends with Yevdokiia, and after a while, she told her the truth about herself. Mariia told her she was Jewish her name was Frida Pinson. Before the war, she lived with her children in the town of Huliaipole in the neighboring Zaporizhzhia region. At the beginning of the German-Soviet war, she fled with her children to the East. For the first time, she stopped in Alchevsk in the Luhansk region. She found a shelter and work and lived with her children there until August 1942, when the Germans occupied the area. They had to leave the house in a hurry because a lot of people knew that they were Jews, and there was a danger of denunciation. After, settling in the village of Preobrazhenne, Frida and her children felt relatively safe.

Yevdokiia felt sorry for Frida and helped her and her children with food and everything she needed. When the conversations and suspicions about Mariia’s Jewish origin arose among the peasants, Yevdokiia tried to convince them otherwise. When it became cold, Yevdokiia took the Pinsons to her house, which was much warmer than their old house and more suitable for living.

In the late autumn of 1942, the Germans raided young people in the village to send them to forced labor in Germany. Among them was Sofiia Pinson. Together with other young people, she was sent to the factory in Bremen, where she was denounced by a pre-war acquaintance. Sofiia miraculously survived in the Auschwitz concentration camp and returned to Ukraine after the war. Frida and Volodymyr lived at Yevdokiia’s place until the expulsion of German troops from the region in September 1943. Sometimes the neighbors blamed Yevdokiia for giving shelter to the "Jews", but fortunately, none of them reported on her.

After the war, the paths of Frida and Yevdokiia parted, they lost connection. Only in 2007, Volodymyr Pinson found the children and grandchildren of his savior, who married and changed her last name. The rescuers and rescued reconnected.

On October 28, 2007, Yevdokiia Ponomarenko was posthumously awarded the honorary title of Righteous Among the Nations.