The teacher Emīlija Ozola and her husband Edgar Ozols lived in the Latvian capital, Riga. The city was occupied by German troops in June 1941. With support from Latvian auxiliary troops, the occupiers began to persecute Riga’s Jews.
In the fall of 1941, Emīlija Ozola’s friend Auguste Bērziņa asked whether she could hide the Jewish woman Regīna Rudina in her home. Rudina and her sister Zāra Frenkel had escaped from the Riga ghetto and were initially hiding with Auguste Bērziņa. However, Bērziņa was single and had no steady employment, so could not provide for two people for long.
Emīlija Ozola suffered from bone tuberculosis and had severe mobility difficulties. Despite this, she and her husband took Regīna Rudina in. They introduced her to the neighbors as a Latvian domestic help. Over time, they found out that Rudina was Jewish, but did not betray her.
After the war, the Ozols remained in close contact with Regīna Rudina. In 2010, the Israeli Holocaust memorial center Yad Vashem honored Emīlija and Edgar Ozols posthumously as Righteous Among the Nations.