The 22nd of June, 1941. With 134 divisions at full fighting strength and 73 more divisions for
deployment behind the front, Nazi Germany, under the codename Operation Barbarossa, invades the
Soviet Union, its ally in the war against Poland. Hitler considers the invasion as part of his plan
to provide the German nation with “Lebensraum” meaning “living space” and an opportunity
to destroy Communism, which he loathes. The Soviet Union sees catastrophic military losses
in the first six weeks after the German attack but fails to collapse and fights the Germans who
terrorize the local population. Among this local population is a teenager who will become known
for resisting the Nazi occupants and killing more than 100 of them. Her name is Zinaida Portnova.
Zinaida Martynovna Portnova
was born on 20 February 1926 in Leningrad then part of the Soviet Union. Her father
worked at the Kirov Plant which after the October Revolution of November 1917 produced tractors.
The Second World War began on the 1st of September 1939 when Nazi Germany invaded Poland.
Poland found itself fighting a two front war when it was invaded by the Soviet Union from
the east on the 17th of September. Warsaw officially surrendered to the Germans on
the 28th of September and one day later in accordance with the secret protocol to
their non-aggression pact, Germany and the Soviet Union partitioned Poland.
However this pact would not last long. Since the 1920s,
core policies of the Nazi movement included:
- the destruction of the
Soviet Union by military force - the permanent elimination of
the perceived Communist threat to Germany - and the seizure of prime land within Soviet
borders as Lebensraum - meaning “Living space”- for long-term German settlement
As such, Adolf Hitler had always regarded the August 23, 1939 German-Soviet nonaggression pact,
commonly referred to as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, as a temporary tactical maneuver. In July
1940, just weeks after the German conquest of France and the Low Countries - Belgium,
Luxembourg, and the Netherlands -, Hitler decided to attack the Soviet Union within
the following year. On December 18, 1940, he signed Directive 21, code-named Operation
“Barbarossa”. This was the first operational order for the invasion of the Soviet Union.
Operation Barbarossa began on Sunday the 22nd of June 1941. Three million German soldiers were
reinforced by Finnish, Romanian, Hungarian, Italian, Slovak, and Croatian troops. Within
weeks, German divisions conquered the Baltic republics of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia.
However, after initial successes by the German troops, the advance came
to a standstill in October and November 1941 due to the onset of the muddy period.
Hitler tried to conquer Leningrad which failed, and the following siege lasted
872 days from the 8th of September 1941 until the 27th of January 1944. The blockade became
one of the longest and most destructive sieges in history, and it was possibly the costliest siege
of all time due to the number of casualties which were suffered throughout its duration.
As a result, the Wehrmacht lacked the strength to take Moscow and a protracted war was imminent.
However, for Nazi Germany this attack was not an "ordinary" military operation.
The war against the Soviet Union was both a war of annihilation between German fascism and Soviet
communism as well as a racial war between German "Aryans" and subhuman Slavs and Jews.
During the siege of Leningrad, which some historians have classified it as a genocide
due to the systematic starvation and intentional destruction of the city's civilian population,
Zinaida Portnova was not in the city anymore. Shortly before the start of Operation Barbarossa,
Zinaida, then a seventh-grade student at the 385th school in Leningrad,
was together with her younger sister Galya sent to school holidays to their
grandmother’s house in the village of Zui, situated near the town of
Obol in northern Belarus. But soon, the war caught up with them there.
German forces took control of the area and began seizing the villagers' property, especially food
and livestock. When the German soldiers tried to confiscated Zinaida family’s cattle as well and
Zinaida’s grandmother objected, they hit her. When Zinaida saw this, she decided she would
fight the Nazi occupants and do everything in her power to get them out of her country. And she did.
In 1942, Zinaida, then 16 years old, joined the Belarusian resistance movement,
becoming a member of the local underground Komsomol organization
in Obol named Young Avengers as many recruits being even younger teenagers.
She quickly became a valuable asset to the resistance. Zinaida began by distributing Soviet
propaganda leaflets in German-occupied Belarus, collecting and hiding weapons for Soviet soldiers,
and reporting on German troop movements. After learning how to use weapons and
explosives from the older members of the group, she participated in sabotage actions at a pump,
local power plant, and brick factory killing upwards of 100 German soldiers.
In 1943, Zinaida Portnova became employed as a kitchen aide in canteen for German soldiers in
Obol. In August, as she was preparing meals, she poisoned the food causing many to fall ill and
some to die. The Germans immediately suspected her but Zinaida said that she was innocent and
ate some of the food in front of the them to prove it was not poisoned. Because she
did not fall ill immediately, they released her. However, Zinaida became sick shortly afterwards,
vomiting heavily but eventually managed to get to the house of her grandmother who
gave her herbal decoctions and whey to drink. Zinaida remained alive.
After she did not return for work, the Germans realized she had been the culprit and started
searching for her. To avoid the Germans, she became a scout of the partisan unit named
after Kliment Voroshilov - one of the original five Marshals of the Soviet Union. In a letter
sent to her parents that month, she wrote that she is "in partisan unit, beating the Nazis".
In December 1943 or January 1944, she was sent back to Obol to infiltrate the garrison,
discover the reason for the recent Young Avengers failures,
then locate and contact the remaining members. However, she was quickly captured.
When she was interrogated by the Gestapo in the village of Goriany, Zinaida, aware that her only
chance of survival was to escape, decided to take action. She took the investigator's pistol off the
table, then shot and killed him. When two German soldiers entered after hearing the gunshots,
she shot them as well. She then ran into the woods but was caught near the banks of a river.
After that, she was brutally beaten and tortured for more than a month by the Germans who were
trying to get any information about the partisans. She had her eyes gouged out,
was burnt with hot irons and had needles shoved under her nails. However, she did
not reveal anything. By the time she emerged from the brutal interrogation, she was blind.
On the 15 January 1944 Zinaida was thrown onto the back of the truck,
driven into the forest and executed. She was 17 years old.
However, Zinaida’s legacy lives on. After the war, she received not only the Order of Lenin,
the highest civilian decoration bestowed by the Soviet Union, but on 1 July 1958,
she was posthumously declared a Hero of the Soviet Union making her the youngest female
ever to be awarded with Soviet Union’s highest honor. Today, numerous plaques and monuments
can be found that had been named in her honor and many school teams and groups are named after her.
Zinaida will be forever remembered as a young brave woman who defied
the Nazi occupants and sacrifized her life for what she stood for.
There were many tears shed for Zinaida Portnova.
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