Zinaida Martynovna Portnovna
Zinaida Martynovna Portnovna was a teenaged Belorussian partisan who fought the Nazis during WWII. She became the youngest female recipient of a Hero of the Soviet Union award, the USSR’s highest distinction for heroic service to the country and society. Unfortunately, it was to be a posthumous award, as Zinaida was captured by the Germans and executed in 1944.
WWII came as a rude shock to Zinaida, as it did for most Soviet citizens. Born and raised in Leningrad, the 15-year-old was hundreds of miles from home, at a summer camp near her grandparents’ home close to the Soviet-German border in Belorussia in June of 1941. When the Nazis invaded, German tanks swept past Zinaida’s summer camp, and the teenager found herself cut off behind enemy lines.
Living under brutal occupation, Zinaida became radicalized when a German soldier struck her grandmother while confiscating the family’s cattle. She joined the underground Komsomol – the youth division of the communist party – and its resistance group, dubbed “The Young Avengers”. Zinaida started by distributing anti-German propaganda leaflets, collecting and hiding weapons for the partisans, reporting on enemy troop movements, and engaging in opportunistic acts of sabotage of enemy vehicles.
After learning the use of weapons and explosives, she participated in raids and sabotage operations against power plants, pumps, and a brick factory in the vicinity of Vitebsk, during which an estimated 100 German soldiers were killed. In 1943, she got a job in a kitchen that served the German garrison of Obol, and poisoned the food. When suspicion fell upon her, she demonstrated her “innocence” by eating the food to prove that it was not poisoned. When she did not exhibit immediate ill effects, she was released. She became violently ill soon thereafter, but survived.
Fleeing Obol, she joined another partisan unit and served as its scout. In late 1943, contact was lost with the Obol partisans, and Zinaida was infiltrated back into the city to investigate. She was captured almost immediately, but managed to grab a pistol her German interrogator had carelessly left lying atop his desk and shot him to death, as well as two guards who came rushing in upon hearing the gunshots. She escaped the building, but was eventually tracked down and captured, after which she was tortured and executed on January 15th, 1944, aged 17.
