31. The Heroic Belorussian Teen
Belorussian teenager Zinaida Martynovna Portnova became a partisan and 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 a posthumous award, as Zinaida was captured by the Germans and executed in 1944.
Zinaida was born and raised in Leningrad, but in the summer of 1941, when she was 15, she was hundreds of miles away from home, at a summer camp near her grandparents’ home close to the Soviet-German border in Belorussia. When the Nazis invaded, German tanks swept past Zinaida’s summer camp, and she found herself cut off behind enemy lines.