Olympiada Daniliyants (Psaropoulou)

Since her birth, Olympiada Danilyants (Psaropoulou) has lived in Odessa with her disabled father (the tram cut his right leg) and her grandmother. Her father worked as an accountant in a factory. The girl’s mother died when she was 10 years old.

Olympiada still remembers how on January 2, 1942, the governor of Transnistria (then the area between the Dniester and Southern Bug rivers) issued an order that all Odessa Jews should go to a concentration camp in the village of Bogdanivka.

Those days Lipa’s or Lipochka’s father (that’s how Olympiada was named in the family), Georgiy, brought to the apartment the Jewish family Kvitko – Mykhailo, his wife Moora, and their daughter Vika, who was a little over a year and a half old at the time. Georgiy told his family: “These people will stay with us.” Indeed, the Kvitko family lived with the Psaropoulo family until the mid-summer of 1943 as one large family. Odesa was occupied not only by German but also by Romanian invaders, so when the searches took place, Mykhailo Kvitko wore a hat and looked like a real Romanian. Moore sang beautifully. Olympiada used to bring a gramophone to listen to loud records and demonstrate that everything was fine in the family. It did distract the attention.

The Psaropoulo family was friends with the neighbors in the yard. When the raids took place, they turned on the music loudly, Georgiy came out and asked loudly: “What do you want?” At the same time, Olympiada appeared with Vika in her arms, and when asked who she was, she answered that the girl was her daughter. The Nazis, seeing a disabled man and a young girl with a baby in their arms, left Psaropoulo’s home, dissatisfied.

In the summer of 1943, the Kvitko family left their rescuers. All their belongings had fit in a small suitcase. In memory of herself, Moora left Olympiada red shuttle shoes, which Lipa liked so much. In January 1944, Olympiada married a war veteran, but she was afraid to share even with her husband how her family had saved Jews during the Nazi occupation.

The rescued tried to find the Psaropoulo family for many years, but the street where they lived was renamed, thus the correspondence got lost.

Only on July 18, 1990, Olympiada learned that the Kvitko family had survived the war. She was happy that she and her father hd been able to help them.

On July 2, 1993, Yad Vashem recognized Georgiy Psaropoulou and his daughter Olympiada as Righteous Among the Nations.