6. A Teenage Heroine Finds Herself Cutoff Behind Nazi Lines
Zinaida Martynovna Portnovna was a Belarusian teenage partisan, who fought the Germans after the Nazi state invaded the USSR during WWII. She became the youngest female recipient of a Hero of the Soviet Union award, the Soviet Union’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.
The Nazi invasion came as a rude shock to Zinaida, as it did for most Soviet citizens. Born and raised in Leningrad, Zinaida, fifteen years old at the time, was hundreds of miles from home at a summer camp near her grandparents’ home close to the Soviet-German border in Belarus in June 1941. When the Germans struck, enemy tanks swept past the summer camp, and the teenager found herself cut off behind enemy lines.
