Psaropoulos Georgyi ; Daughter: Daniliantz Olimpiada (Psaropoulo)

Psaropoulos, Georgyi Danilyants-Psaropoulou, Olympiada In January 1942, in Odessa (today Odesa), Georgyi Psaropoulos, a native of Greece, and his daughter, Olympiada, known as Lipa (later Danilyants) then 17 years old, saved the life of Mikhail Kvitko, his wife, Amalia, and their baby girl, Vicki. They hid them in their apartment. Georgyi and Mikhail had been friends since their university years. When the authorities started to expel the Jews of Odessa to the camps outside the city, the Kvitko family escaped and came to ask Psaropoulos for help. Olympiada, Georgyi’s daughter, cared for feeding the Jews in hiding: she spent hours in queues in order to buy some provisions. She also appealed to an old woman, who lived in the same courtyard, asking her to care for baby Vicki. The woman was told that the baby’s mother had died and the father was fighting at the front. She was paid to take care of the baby and for her food and was promised more money later, when the father would come to fetch her. It was very risky for the Psaropoulos family to hide the Kvitkos. They jeopardized their lives to save them out of simple love and friendship. The neighbors did not know that the Psaropouloses were hiding Jews, but at some point they began to become more and more suspicious about the baby’s identity. Mikhail Kvitko then decided to leave Odessa and go to Bucharest where his wife’s parents and sister lived. He left with Vicki a month before Amalia followed. After the war, the connection between the Kvitkos and their rescuers ceased, since all the letters written to them were returned unopened. The reason was that the name of the street was changed and the Kvitko family did not know this. The Kvitko family immigrated to Israel from Romania in 1959. The connection with their rescuers in Odessa was resumed only in 1991, when Mikhail found out about the change of the street name. By that time only Olympiada was left, because her father had passed away some years earlier. OnJune 2, 1993, Yad Vashem recognized Georgyi Psaropoulos and his daughter, Olympiada Danilyants, as Righteous Among the Nations.