On
this date, 15 January 1944, the youngest ever female hero of the Soviet Union,
Zinaida Portnova died. I will post information about her from Wikipedia and
other links.
Zinaida Portnova
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Born
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Zinaida Martynovna
Portnova
20 February 1926 Leningrad |
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Died
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15 January 1944 (aged 17)
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Occupation
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Young Pioneer Organization of the Soviet Union
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Zinaida Martynovna Portnova, commonly known as Zina Portnova
(Russian: Зинаида Мартыновна Портнова, Зина
Портнова) (20
February 1926 – 15 January 1944) was a Russian teenager, Soviet partisan
and Hero of the Soviet Union.
Biography
Zina
Portnova was born in Leningrad on
20 February 1926. She was the daughter of a working class Belarusian family. Her father worked at the
Kirov Plant. She was a seventh grade
student at the 385th school in Leningrad in 1941, when she left for her
grandmother's house in the Vitebsk region. Not long afterwards, Nazi
Germany invaded the Soviet
Union. An incident with the invading Nazi troops, who hit her
grandmother while they were confiscating the cattle, led her to hate the
Germans.
In
1942 Portnova joined the Belarusian
resistance movement, becoming a member of the local underground Komsomol
organization in Obol,
Vitebsk Voblast, named Young Avengers. She
began by distributing Soviet propaganda leaflets in the 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, Portnova
participated in sabotage actions at a
pump, local power plant, and brick factory. These acts are estimated to have
killed upwards of 100 German soldiers.
In
1943, Portnova became employed as a kitchen aid in Obol. In August, she poisoned
the food meant for the Nazi garrison stationed there. Immediately falling
suspect, she said she was innocent and ate some of the food in front of the
Nazis to prove it was not poisoned; after she did not fall ill immediately,
they released her. Portnova became sick afterwards, vomiting heavily but
eventually recovering from the poison after drinking much whey. After she did
not return to 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. In a letter sent to her
parents that month, she wrote that "together, [they] would beat the
Nazis". In October 1943, Portnova joined the VLKSM.
In
December 1943 or January 1944 Portnova 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. She was quickly captured. Reports of
her escape vary. One is that, during Gestapo interrogation in the village of
Goriany, 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 attempted to escape the compound and ran into the woods,
where she was caught by the banks of a river.
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| Zinaida Portnova |
Another
version is that the Gestapo interrogator, in a fit of rage, threw his pistol to
the table after threatening to shoot her. Taking the pistol, Portnova shot him.
Escaping through the door, she shot a guard in the corridor, then another in
the courtyard. After the pistol misfired when Portnova attempted to shoot a
guard blocking her access to the street, she was captured.
After
being recaptured, Portnova was tortured, possibly for information. She was
later driven into the forest and executed or killed during torture on 15
January 1944.
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Monument to Zinaida Portnovа - Soviet pioneer-hero. Former
pioneer camp "Scarlet Sails" village
Berry, near the city of Togliatti, Russia
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Legacy
On
1 July 1958, Portnova was posthumously declared a Hero of the Soviet Union by the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet.
She also received the Order of Lenin. In 1969, the village of Zuya
dedicated a commemorative plaque in her honour. She also
had numerous Young Pioneer groups
named in her honour.
Portnova
has had many school teams and groups named after her, as well the museum to the
Komsomol, situated on the highway between Polotsk and Vitebsk, and a
school in St Petersburgh. There are two monuments to her, a bust in Minsk and an obelisk
in the village of Obol.
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