Mikhalap Galina ; Mother: Stepanida

Mikhalap, Stepanida Mikhalap, Galina In the 1930s, Stepanida Mikhalap, the daughter of a family of prosperous farmers whose private land was nationalized by the Soviet government, lived in the city of Bobruysk, in the district of Mogilev (today Babruysk, Magilyou District). The Soviet authorities had arrested her husband in 1937, and during the German occupation she was left with her two daughters, 17-year-old Galina and seven-year-old Nelya. About ten years before the war, Mikhalap had been friendly with her neighbors, the Matz family. A short time after the occupation of Bobruysk, Mikhalap helped the Matzes by giving 22-year-old Genya Matz a small cross. Wearing this, the young woman managed to persuade a German patrol that she was not Jewish when she escaped from her home on the night the Germans were rounding up the city’s Jews. That same night, she fled to Mikhalap’s home, where she was sheltered for the following three months. Mikhalap endangered herself by harboring a Jew, particularly because her home was next door to German headquarters, and the police station, and a German officer was billeted in her home. Despite this, Mikhalap and her daughter Galina hid Matz in their basement without anyone apart from family members knowing. Mikhalap and her daughter took care of all Matz’s needs and even managed to procure false identity papers for her. With these, Matz moved to Minsk, where she lived under an assumed identity until the liberation of the city on July 3, 1944. When the war ended, Matz moved to Saratov in Russia, from where she corresponded with the Mikhalaps until her death in 1987. In the 1990s, Galina Mikhalap settled in Israel. On February 6, 1994, Yad Vashem recognized Stepanida Mikhalap and her daughter, Galina Mikhalap, as Righteous Among the Nations.