Chaplanova Olga

Chaplanova, Olga Olga Chaplanova was a Russian nanny in Minsk, 45 years old, who took care of Svetlana, b.1940, the child of Rafael Bromberg and Galina Lipskaya. In July 1941, after the Germans occupied the city, the Jews were ordered to move to the newly created ghetto. The Brombergs decided not to take their child with them to the ghetto and instead left her in Olga Chaplanova’s care. She presented Svetlana as her granddaughter and took care of her for the three years of the German occupation until the Red Army liberated the city on July 3, 1944. Both Svetlana’s parents survived the Holocaust. Her father fled the ghetto and fought in a partisan unit. In January 1943, he was arrested by the Soviets and interned in a prison camp in the interior of the USSR. He was only released in 1956. Her mother, Galina, was deported from the ghetto to the Majdanek camp in Poland. After the liberation in July 1944, she was also arrested by the Soviet authorities and was interned in a Soviet prison camp. Svetlana continued to be raised by Olga Chaplanova who in 1946 moved to Syzran, Kuybyshev District in the Russian Federation. She used to call her “babushka [grandmother] Olya”. Only after the de-stalinization process in the USSR, were Svetlana’s parents released from the Soviet camps, rehabilitated and the family was reunited again. On December 5, 2002, Yad Vashem recognized Olga Chaplanova as Righteous Among the Nations.