At the age of 18, Nadezhda Kreso lived with her parents in Minsk and studied law. After the Wehrmacht’s invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, her father Andrei Kreso was drafted into the Red Army. German troops occupied Minsk at the end of June 1941 and set up a ghetto shortly afterward. The Kresos’ apartment was in the area made into the ghetto, and Nadezhda Kreso and her mother had to move out.
Nadezhda Kreso feared for her Jewish friends now interned in the ghetto, since mass murders were taking place there. Her Jewish friend Mariya Gliot asked her in early 1943 to hide her cousin Lea Rudermann’s three-year-old son in her home. Although they risked a death sentence, Nadezhda and Anna Kreso took in little Leonid and later also Lena Gringauz, another Jewish friend. The helpers hid and cared for the two of them until Minsk was liberated in July 1944.
In 2000 Anna Kreso and Nadezhda Solovyova (née Kreso) were honored for their help by the Israeli Holocaust Memorial Center Yad Vashem as Righteous Among the Nations.