Jukhnel Vikenti & Yevgenia ; Daughter: Zhilenko Zinaida (Jukhnel)

Yukhnel, Vikentiy Yukhnel, Yevgeniya Zhilenko (Yukhnel), Zinaida Vikentiy Yukhnel, his wife, Yevgeniya, and their daughter, Zinaida, lived in Kirovograd (today Kirovohrad), which the Germans conquered on August 4, 1941. A few weeks later, 16-year-old Zinaida met Alla Granovskaya, a good friend and classmate. Granovskaya, in tears, told Zinaida that the police had arrested her parents after searching their home but that she had managed to escape. Zinaida invited Granovskaya to her house and hid her there for several months. The whole Yukhnel family treated Granovskaya warmly and sympathetically and tried to make her comfortable and raise her spirits. Yukhnel and his wife also looked for a way to smuggle their ward out of the city to a place where she would not be recognized as a Jew. They eventually found a man who agreed to let her join his family on their journey to Odessa. In March 1942, Zinaida and Granovskaya went to meet the man but on the way Granovskaya was arrested. Zinaida ran away and when she arrived home she told her parents what had happened and the three of them left the house for a few days in fear that they would be sought for aiding a Jew. However, at the police station, Granovskaya met the headmaster of the school where she and Zinaida had studied. He was working as a clerk at the station and although he knew that she was Jewish he gave her papers with a Ukrainian name and thus she left Kirovograd. She wandered round the countryside and, in late 1942, she was sent as a forced laborer to Germany. After the war, Granovskaya returned to her birthplace, where she stayed with the Yukhnel family until she married. She maintained contact with the Yukhnels until her death, in 1956. On January 10, 1999, Yad Vashem recognized Zinaida Zhilenko and her parents, Vikentiy and Yevgeniya Yukhnel, as Righteous Among the Nations.