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Overlooked Important WWII Figures from History

Khalid Elhassan October 20, 2019 31 min

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.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.