Lazarev Nikolay

Lazarev, Nikolay Nikolay Lazarev was born in 1908 and raised in the city of Dauvagpils, in a Russian Orthodox family. In Riga, to where the family moved when he was still a child, he met and became friends with Ilya Dvorkin, his neighbor on Eisargu Street. They each married before the outbreak of the Second World War. Nikolay became the father of two sons and a daughter, while the Ilya had a daughter and a son. Following the conquest of Riga on July 1, 1941, the Germans, aided by antisemitic Latvian collaborators, abused, plundered, and murdered the Jewish population. From August to October 1941, 30,000 of Riga’s remaining Jews were incarcerated in a ghetto, among them the Dvorkin family. In the initial period, when non-Jews were still allowed to enter the ghetto, Nikolay Lazarev visited his friend. At the end of November and in December 1941, when the Germans began the mass murder of the Jews of the ghetto in Rumbuli Forest, Ilya Dvorkin asked his old friend for help, and he did not let him down. Nikolay Lazarev organized the escape from the ghetto of Ilya’s wife, Musya, and of their children – Gita, 11, and nine-year-old Israel. He also ensured that they had a place to hide: Mari was taken to the village of Dolsala, where she remained under an assumed identity until the liberation; Israel was placed in the custody of the local Russian Orthodox Church, which promised Nikolay it would look after him; and Gita spent the entire period of the German occupation in the Lazarev home in Riga. Sometimes Nikolay took Gita to his friends, the Kozhemyakins, in the village of Vilyany, under the assumed identity of his first-born daughter, Nina. Gita’s rescuers looked after her in their home for almost three years, from the end of 1941 until the liberation of Riga in October 1944. Her mother, Mari, who survived the Holocaust in the village, returned to Riga upon the city’s liberation. Her father, Ilya Dvorkin, remained in the ghetto until 1943, when he was sent toKaiserwald camp, near Riga. As the Red Army approached Latvia, he was moved to Stutthof concentration camp, where he was held until that camp’s liberation by the Red Army in May 1945, whereupon he also returned to Riga. Only the younger son, Israel, whom the Church had promised to look after, disappeared without a trace. After the war, the two families retained their close ties. Ilya Dvorkin, who found it difficult to walk because of his poor physical condition, was supported by his friend Nikolay Lazarev. They remained fast friends until Nikolay’s death in 1970. On September 15, 2003, Yad Vashem recognized Nikolay Lazarev as Righteous Among the Nations.