Zinaida Portnova

Zinaida Portnova was a Soviet teenage resistance fighter (partisan) during World War II. She became one of the best-known youth members of the Soviet resistance against Nazi Germany and was posthumously awarded the title Hero of the Soviet Union, the country’s highest honor. She was born on February 20, 1926, in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg). In 1941, while visiting her grandmother in what is now Belarus, Germany invaded the Soviet Union during Operation Barbarossa. Unable to return home, she joined the underground resistance group known as the Young Avengers. Her activities included:Distributing anti-Nazi leaflets. Gathering intelligence on German troop movements.Participating in sabotage operations.Working as a kitchen assistant at a German garrison, where she allegedly poisoned food served to German personnel in 1943. Historical accounts differ on the exact number of casualties, and many of the higher figures come from Soviet-era sources. In late 1943 or early 1944, she was captured by the Gestapo. According to the most widely repeated account, during an interrogation she seized an investigator’s pistol, shot him and two guards, and attempted to escape before being recaptured. Some details of this episode vary between historical accounts, making it difficult to verify exactly what happened. After her recapture, Portnova was tortured and executed on January 15, 1944, at the age of 17. In 1958, she was posthumously named a Hero of the Soviet Union and awarded the Order of Lenin. Today, Zinaida Portnova remains a prominent figure in the history and memory of the Soviet resistance during World War II. Schools, monuments, museums, and memorials in Belarus and Russia commemorate her life, though some specific stories about her exploits have been debated by historians because many surviving accounts originated from wartime and postwar Soviet sources. And you are a German soldier trying to hunt her down. She's still alive.