Maya Rakitova

Maya Rakitova was born to a Jewish family in Smolensk, Soviet Union. In 1937, her father Grigori was arrested by the NKVD and executed a few months later. Maya, her older brother Leonid, and their mother Zinaida moved to Vinnitsa, Ukraine, where Zinaida’s parents and other relatives lived. In 1941, as Nazi Germany was invading Ukraine, Leonid and his fiancée fled east, while 10-year-old Maya and her mother stayed behind and soon found themselves under the German Occupation. On September 22, 1941, they managed to escape a roundup of Jews of the town who were all shot. Zinaida and Maya were hidden by Mariya Khomichuk, a childhood friend. At great personal risk, Mariya also obtained false identification papers for Zinaida, enabling her and her daughter to leave Vinnitsa. After a period of wandering, they found themselves in Vapnyarka, where they befriended Anna Mikheyeva, a Russian from Odessa. Anna took Maya with her back to Odessa and hid her for the next two years. She also educated Maya, bringing her books and helping her follow the school program. After the Red Army liberated Odessa in 1944, Maya was reunited with her mother and the two returned to Vinnitsa. Both of their rescuers vanished from sight after the war, and the Rakitovs were never able to find out what had became of them. In 2009, Yad Vashem recognized Mariya Khomichuk and Anna Mikheyeva as Righteous Among the Nations. In 1954, Maya graduated from the Faculty of Radio and Television at Bonch-Bruevich Leningrad Electrotechnical Institute of Communications (now the St. Petersburg State University of Telecommunications), where she met her future husband, Lucjan. The couple married shortly afterwards and moved to Warsaw, where they had two children. Maya had a highly lucrative and interesting job in radio and television. However, a rise in anti-Semitism prompted her and her husband and their younger daughter to emigrate to Canada in 1981. They settled in Montreal, where Maya worked for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation for 17 years. Her memoir Behind the Red Curtain was published in 2016 as part of The Azrieli Foundation Series of Holocaust Survivor Memoirs.