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# Two sisters in German-occupied Mariupol exchanged sons to save a Jewish child
- URL: https://theparnassian.com/en/chernenkii-i-belenkii/
- Published: 2021-05-12T07:11:38.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-02T18:55:19.000Z
- Author: Alexandr Radayev
- Tags: Archive, In the Press, Books, Mores

The Dark One and the Fair One.

One can live by Shakespeare in Mariupol. When the Germans entered the dusty town, nothing in life seemed to have changed, for apples were still apples, and a house was still a house, and the October sun went down into the bay just as before. But everything changed for two sisters of restless Russian beauty, each of whom had a son, one by Alexei and the other by David. The boys were a year old each, and their husbands had been roaming the war since the summer.

As is customary, an order was promptly issued for the registration of Jews, on pain of being shot.

“To go or not to go?” was the first question, because the son by David was, under all exact German laws, a Jew. The answer was not to go, on pain of being shot.

The other was not a question but an answer at once: “We shall be denounced.”

A way out was found. Children, a fair one and a dark one, at the age of one, are hard to tell apart. The neighbours were given to understand that, thank God, there was no need to register theirs, since he had been born not of David but of a marital infidelity. And he was a truly Russian person. As proof, a son was produced, but only the fair one, an almost perfect Aryan to look at, who was in fact Alexei’s.

The mother of the fair one, recently arrived from Moscow, was sent off at once to a Greek village, to live there, but only with the dark one, her sister’s son. For there everyone was dark, but they were Greeks, and they were permitted to live rather than to die.

So they exchanged sons.  
And so they were saved, of course, on pain of being shot. The shooting of the Greeks, the shooting of the wise father who had ordered the sisters to do all this, the shooting of a son for his dark curls and of the other son for the deception of his own kin. Of David’s family, when he returned from the war, no one was saved except his only son and his wife.

But he now had two sons.

And Alexei, on his return, now had two sons.

Such is the touching text by Yakov Mirkin from [Rossiyskaya Gazeta](https://rg.ru/2020/08/13/pavlu-medvedevu-ispolniaetsia-80-let.html?ref=theparnassian.com). One of the boys in this story is today the well-known **mathematician, Doctor of Sciences and ombudsman Pavel Alexeyevich Medvedev**