Afanasiev Faddei & Afanasieva Jevdokija

Afanasiev, Pjotr Afanasieva, Lucija Afanasiev, Faddej Afanasieva, Jevdokija Afanasiev, Filipp Afanasieva, Anastasija Mikulova, Minadora Pjotr Afanasiev, a Russian, was a gardener who lived with his wife, Lucija, near the fortress in the city of Daugavpils, occupied by the Germans on June 26, 1941. Following the liquidation of the ghetto, on May 17, 1942, several hundred Jewish workers were still held on the grounds of the fortress. Pjotr witnessed the suffering of the Jewish prisoners and was aware that one day they would be executed. This knowledge motivated him to approach a few of them and offer to hide them in his home in time of need. They did not all believe he was sincere, but Pjotr was determined to save Jews, and hence prepared a hidden hideaway under the floor of his kitchen. On October 20, 1943, Germans and local policemen surrounded the fortress and the prisoners understood that meant an end to their lives. In various ways, several Jews managed to flee and dispersed throughout the area. Five women – Bronja Majeva, Mira Musina, Michla Segal, and Bunja Zelikman with her daughter Rachel – found their way to Pjotr’s home. Zelikman and her daughter stayed only overnight, since there was not enough space in the hiding place. At dawn the two went to seek shelter among their friends in a nearby village, but no one agreed to take them in for more than a day or two. They returned to Pjotrs’s home two weeks later. Then his wife, Lucija, put them on a wagon, covered them with straw, and took them to the Krasnoye khutor, in the vicinity of Krāslava (about 40 km from Daugavpils), to Pjotrs’s parents and siblings. The khutor was in an isolated place, and Pjotr’s family – his parents, Faddej and Jevdokija, their son Filips and his wife, Anastasija, and their daughter Minadora Mikulova and her small children – lived there. They warmly received Zelikman and her daughter and hid them in the attic. Bunja and Rachel’s rescuers shared their meager supply of foodwith them, provided them with blankets and clothing, and once a month, under cover of darkness one of the Afanasiev family members would take them to a bathhouse. Toward June 1944, Zelikman and her daughter were transferred to an underground hideaway in the barn, where to their great surprise, they met Tanja Levshtein, who had been hiding with the Afanasievs since 1942. The three women – Majeva, Musina and Segal - who had been hiding with Pjotr and Lucija, were moved to the attic of Pjotrs’s parents’ house, and until the liberation in the fall of 1944, they did not know about the three Jewish women hiding in the barn. For many years after the war, the survivors kept in touch with their rescuers and they visited one another frequently. Later on, Zelikman and her daughter immigrated to the United States. On May 4, 1994, Yad Vashem recognized Pjotr and Lucija Afanasievs, Faddej and Jevdokija Afanasievs, Filipp and Anastasija Afanasievs, and Minadora Mikulova as Righteous Among the Nations.