Shepchenko Yekaterina (Rodkevich)

Shepchenko, Yekaterina Henya Harel (née Rosenman, b. 1928) was born in Bialystok, Poland, where at the outbreak of the war she lived with her parents and younger brother David. In 1941 the family was forced into the city’s ghetto, where they lived for two years. On February 5, 1943, on a day when Henya was working outside the ghetto, her parents were arrested and deported. Her maternal uncle, in an attempt to find her shelter, smuggled her out of the ghetto to a Warsaw family who owned a club for cardplayers. Knowing this could only be a temporary arrangement, he turned to an ex-student of his for help. Henya ended up finding shelter with the friend of a friend of the student, a member of the expatriate Russian community in Warsaw named Yekaterina Shepchenko. Yekaterina took in Henya, and they began a mutually beneficial arrangement: Yekaterina hid Henya, and in return Henya cleaned, cooked, and sometimes shopped for Yekaterina, who was physically disabled. Though Yekaterina had become addicted to morphine in the course of her treatment for her physical ailments, the two had a warm relationship and cared deeply for one another. To help Henya move freely in town and ensure she would not be caught, Yekaterina arranged false identity papers for her, and Henya committed to memory an alternate biography—that her name was Helene Yegoroff, and that she was half-Russian and half-Georgian. In August 1944 many members of the Russian expatriate community in Warsaw, who had fled during the Russian Revolution and were staunchly anticommunist, feared retribution from the Russian forces that were on the cusp of reoccupying the city. They were granted permission to immigrate to Germany, and many, including Yekaterina, chose to do so, settling in Ravensburg, in southern Germany. During this time Yekaterina’s health took a turn for the worse, and she passed away shortly after the war’s end. Though she had several offers to remain within the Russian community in Ravensburg, Henya decided to leave and seek out biological relatives. She discovered that she had two cousins in Israel, and she joined them there in late 1948. On November 12, 2013, Yekaterina Shepchenko was recognized by Yad Vashem as Righteous Among the Nations.