25. The Youngest Heroine of the Soviet Union
Belorussian teenager Zinaida Martynovna Portnovna fought the Nazis as a partisan during WWII. She ended up as 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.
WWII came as a rude shock to Zinaida, as it did for most Soviet citizens. Born and raised in Leningrad, she was fifteen years old and 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.