Bank of Portraits / Prutska Kateryna and Mariia, Medyna Domna and Hlushchenko (Medyna) Larysa
Prutska Kateryna and Mariia, Medyna Domna and Hlushchenko (Medyna) Larysa
Kateryna Prutska, with her daughter Mariia, lived in the village of Korsunka on the left bank of the Dnipro River in the Kherson region, while her second cousin Domna Medyna, with her daughter Larysa, lived on the right bank of the Dnipro in the village of Lvove. During the Nazi occupation of the region, the sisters hid two Jewish boys.
Oleh and Vladyslav were born into a Ukrainian-Jewish family. Their parents, Avram Plotkin and Mariia Myronenko, were teachers in the village of Velyki Kopani. In June 1941, Avram went to the front, leaving Mariia with five-year-old Oleh and three-year-old Vladyk in the occupied village. Soon, someone from the villagers reported that she was the wife of a Jewish communist and the mother of two Jewish children. Mariia was arrested. A local resident, whose wife also worked at the school, saved her. He testified that Mariia was his niece, secured her release, and helped her to move with the boys to her mother Ahafiia Myronenko's house in the village of Korsunka. It was safer in his native village, and the local head sympathized with Mariia, warning her of possible raids. At that time, Mariia sent her sons to her friend Kateryna Prutska, who hid Oleh and Vladyk in the attic or bushes by the river. When it became dangerous in the village, Kateryna would transported the boys across the Dnipro River to the village of Lvove, to her sister Domna. In her house with a double roof, the brothers found an ideal hiding place. Kateryna's and Domna's daughters, 13-year-old Mariia and 11-year-old Larysa, took care of the boys in the absence of adults.
After the war, Avram Plotkin returned home, and the family reunited. Oleh and Vladyslav maintained friendly relations with their rescuers for many years. In the 1990s, the brothers emigrated to Israel.
In 2014, Yad Vashem recognized Kateryna and Mariia Prutsky, Domna Medyna, and Larysa Hlushchenko as Righteous Among the Nations.
Svitlana Demchenko
Kyiv
National museum of the History of Ukraine in the Second World War
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