Borovskaya Makrina

Borovskaya, Makrina In the late 1930s, Makrina Borovskaya, a young villager, arrived in Odessa (today Odesa) to look for work. There, she met Asya Yakers, who invited Makrina to live in her apartment until she found a job. In due course, Borovskaya was given a one-room apartment in the building where Yakers lived with her husband and daughter, Larisa. After the Germans and Romanians conquered the city on October 16, 1941, Borovskaya hid the three members of the Yakers family in her small apartment. However, as a result of denunciation to the authorities, the Jews were caught and sent to the ghetto established in the Slobodka (Slobidka) suburb, where Asya was separated from her husband who was sent to a work camp. Asya and her nine-year-old daughter were relocated to the municipal jail. After a few weeks, Borovskaya found Asya and Larisa and, with a bribe, she managed to secure their release. As she could not take them back to her apartment, Borovskaya concealed her wards for several months in various destroyed and abandoned houses. Eventually she managed to obtain identity papers in a Ukrainian name for Asya and the three of them left Odessa. Borovskaya and the Yakerses settled in the village of Yasinovo (Yasenove), where Borovskaya’s brother Timofey lived. He owned a farm and needed extra workers. About six months later, Borovskaya moved with the Jews to the village of Ivanovka (Ivanivka), to the home of her other brother, Dmitriy. They stayed there until the liberation in March 1944. The two brothers never knew that the mother and daughter with Borovskaya were Jewish. After the war, Yakers and Larisa settled in Odessa and they remained friendly with Borovskaya for many years. On May 31, 1999, Yad Vashem recognized Makrina Borovskaya as Righteous Among the Nations.