Olga Bilostotska

In 1941, Olga was 3 years old, and her sister Oleksandra was 5. The family lived in the center of Kyiv, and in the summer they moved to their grandmother (father’s mother – Maria Vasylivna from Bialystok) and his sister Nina Afanasivna in Vorzel. Grandma’s house was near the forest, and on the other side of the estate was the house of Olga’s parents. There the family met the war.
The father went to the front, and the pregnant mother with 2 children stayed in Vorzel.
After some time, a daughter from Kyiv came to the neighbors of Pylyp and Anastasia Matvienko with her granddaughter Ela (Gershman Evelina Motelevna). The children spent all their time together. Ela almost never left the Bialystok family’s house, especially during raids by the occupiers. The girls considered each other sisters.
Grandma and aunt didn’t come in often; the grandmother did not allow visitors to her house, which was not very pleasant and not at all understandable. But she very often went into the forest or somewhere else, and then came back with some food.
Olga will never forget the end of August 1943. One day, Vlasivtsi visited Vorzel and their estate. They did not like how Ela looked and threatened Olga’s mother, but the woman with three children persuaded them to leave her family alone and not to touch the neighbor’s grandson. They left, but right after that Grandma and Aunt Nina disappeared, and Grandma’s house caught fire and burned down.
Already after the liberation of Vorzel, the family found out that the grandmother and Nina were in contact with the partisans and passed on information to them that it was impossible to get into the house, because the grandmother was hiding another Jewish girl there – Nelya Galakhova, who managed to escape only because someone managed to inform the grandmother about the raid, and Maria Vasilievna sent Nelya to Kyiv. Both women were tortured.
As an adult, Olga accidentally met Nelya, who told her the story of her rescue.
For many years after the war, Olga’s mother did not know peace. She would wake up in the middle of the night, run to the window, open it, and look for escape routes to save her children and Ella.
Olga and Ela remained sisters and did not lose contact. But a few years ago, Ela, after a terrible tragedy that happened to her family (her 15-year-old grandson was killed by classmates), went to Germany. At first, she sometimes called Olga, but later the calls stopped.
ON NOVEMBER 21, 1999, YAD VASHEM RECOGNIZED STEPAN, NINA, AND MARIA BILOSTOCKY AS RIGHTEOUSNESSES OF THE NATIONS OF THE WORLD.
ON MARCH 26, 2001, THE JEWISH COUNCIL OF UKRAINE RECOGNIZED VIRA BILOSTOCKA AS THE RIGHTEOUSNESS OF BABYNY YAR.
ON NOVEMBER 5, 2009, THE JEWISH COUNCIL OF UKRAINE RECOGNIZED OLGA BILOSTOCKA AS THE DAUGHTER OF THE JUSTICE OF BABYNY YAR.