Yelnykov Semen and Yelyzaveta 

In the 1930s, Zaporizhzhia became the industrial heart of Stalin's modernization. There were special workers' settlements which were quickly built next to the industrial giants. There the "builders of socialism" crowded in cramped and shabby barracks.

On the eve of the war, the Yelnykov family lived in one of such barracks (№ 38), in the 7th village in Zaporizhzhia. The family consisted of Semen, his mother Feodosiia, sister Yelyzaveta, wife Olena, seven-year-old daughter Valentyna and two twin boys who were born in the eve of the Nazi invasion.

Semen worked as a mechanic at the Dnipro Aluminum Plant. At the beginning of the war he prepared the equipment of the plant for evacuation to the East. At the end of September 1941, under bombardment and shelling, the family tried to leave the city in the last echelon together with the enterprise. But in the town of Synelnykove, in the Dnipropetrovsk region, the tracks were already destroyed and they had to return.

A few days before the German troops occupied Zaporizhzhia, Semen's wife Olena was killed during the enemy air bombardment. The twin babies died soon: in the chaos of the war, the father could not provide them with something to substitute breast milk.

On October 4, 1941, the Nazis entered the city.

Semen was the only member of the family who worked. He found a new job and was servicing boilers in public baths.

With the arrival of the occupiers in Zaporizhzhia, the systematic persecution of the Jewish population began which reached its apogee in the spring of 1942. Thus, by April 1942, about 4 thousand Jews of the city were shot in the anti-tank trenches near the state farm named after Stalin.

In March 1942, someone knocked on the Yelnykov’s door. It was 20-year-old Sara Sas, a medical student, with a yellow armband that all Jews were forced to wear. As it turned out, she came to Zaporizhzhia from Vinnytsia before the war to visit her brother Yakiv. For unknown reasons, the girl was not evacuated with his family, and she found herself in a forced labor camp for Jews. One day, when the guard took them to work, Sara escaped and ran into the nearest building. It was Yelnykov's barracks. The girl begged to hide her, and Semen agreed. Sara was put in bed as if she was a sick family member. The girl hid for three weeks until she was noticed by a neighbor. She demanded from Semen to get rid of Sara, threatening to inform the authorities. The consequences of helping the Jews were well known in the city: "Those who hide the Jews and commissars will be executed together with the whole family."

Yelnykov embarrassed his neighbor, saying that she had two sons in the Red Army, and maybe they also would need someone's help. But she was implacable.

Sara was disguised and provided with a fake passport with the name of Hanna Samarska. Semen's sister Yelyzaveta took her out of the town under the guise of exchanging stuff for food. On the way, the Ukrainian taught the Jew to cross herself as an Orthodox. In the village of Lepetykha in the Kherson region Sara got a job on a local collective farm, and the girls separated. Ten months later, Sara was deported to forced labor in Germany, where she survived the war.

Meanwhile, Semen and Yelyzaveta Yelnykov joined the Zaporizhzhia underground. They acted as a part of the "117th partisan detachment" named after Chapaiev ", organizing sabotage at local enterprises and helping Soviet prisoners of war to escape from the camps.

In 1945, Sara Sas returned to Vinnytsia, but there was nobody to meet her: no one from her relatives survived the occupation, and the family house burnt down. She went to Zaporizhzhia to thank her rescuers and lived with the Yelnykov family in their small barracks for more than a year. They have not lost contact since then.

Semen died in 1949. Sara and Yelyzaveta were friends until her death in 1985.

On December 30, 2001, Yad Vashem awarded Semen Yelnykov and his sister Yelyzaveta the honorary title of Righteous Among the Nations.