22. A Young Girl Caught Behind Nazi Lines
Zinaida Martynovna Portnova 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 a posthumous award, as Zinaida was captured by the Germans and executed in 1944. WWII had came as a rude shock to Zinaida, as it did for most Soviet citizens. Born and raised in Leningrad, fifteen-year-old Zinaida 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. Zinaida lived under brutal occupation, and became radicalized when a German soldier struck her grandmother as he confiscated the family’s cattle. She joined the underground Komsomol – the Communist Party’s youth division – and its resistance group, dubbed “The Young Avengers”. At first, Zinaida distributed anti-German propaganda leaflets. She gradually progressed to more serious tasks, and began to collect and hide weapons for the partisans, report on enemy troop movements, and engage in opportunistic acts of sabotage of enemy vehicles.