Zinaida Portnova: The Soviet Teenager Who Targeted A Nazi Garrison

BloomsburyZinaida Portnova at the age of 14.

For Zinaida Portnova, resisting the Nazis was personal. She’d watched with fury as invading Nazis came to her grandmother’s farm in the Soviet Union, and hit the old woman when she refused to give up her cattle.

From that moment on, Portnova despised the Nazis. She set out to do whatever she could to bring them down.

Though she was just a teenager, Portnova joined the All-Union Leninist Young Communist League, which was also known as the Young Avengers. These Soviet resistance fighters set out to sabotage Germans wherever they could. Early on, Portnova helped by passing out leaflets and spying on soldiers.

But she wanted to do more. And in August 1943, she finally got her chance.

Then, Portnova managed to get a job as a cooking assistant at a German garrison. As the Germans gathered to eat, Portnova quietly poisoned their meal. The Germans started to get sick — and some of them even died. Suspicion swiftly fell on the new, young Soviet cook.

But as the Germans questioned her, Portnova professed her innocence. She even took a dramatic bite of the poisoned food that she had cooked to prove that she had done nothing wrong.

Wikimedia CommonsA statue commemorating Zinaida Portnova.

At first, the ruse worked. The Germans let her go and Portnova escaped to her grandmother’s home. Though she soon fell ill, her grandma gave her whey to counter the poison. It wasn’t until Portnova missed work the next morning that the Germans realized that they’d made a mistake.

Free, but on the run, Portnova continued her resistance activities until 1944. At that point, local police arrested her and turned her over to the Nazis.

Conscious that the end was likely near, Portnova refused to go down without a fight. As a German soldier interrogated her, she suddenly lurched forward and grabbed his pistol from the desk between them. In her short-lived escape, Portnova shot her interrogator and two Nazi guards standing outside.

Sadly, the Nazis soon caught up to her. After they tortured Portnova, they executed her by gunshot shortly before her 18th birthday.

But her comrades never forgot her sacrifice. On July 1, 1958, the Soviet Union awarded Portnova the country’s highest honor, “Hero of the Soviet Union.” She was the youngest woman to ever receive it.

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