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Women of Peace and Those Sided the Wrong of World War II

Khalid Elhassan November 20, 2020 32 min

World War II - Italian resistance movement — Women of the resistance in Italy. Wall Street Journal

4. When Captured, This Heroine Killed a Nazi Officer During Her Interrogation

Zinaida Portnova fled Obol, then joined another partisan unit and served as its scout. In late 1943, contact was lost with the Obol partisans, so Zinaida was infiltrated back into the city to investigate.

She was captured almost immediately. During questioning, she managed to grab a pistol her German interrogator had carelessly left lying atop his desk. She shot the Nazi official to death, as well as two guards who came rushing in upon hearing the gunfire. Zinaida escaped the building, but was eventually tracked down and captured. She was tortured mercilessly, before her execution on January 15^th, 1944, aged seventeen.

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.