A 17 year old girl once killed more than 100German soldiers during WWII, all while making them think she was on their side!
Zinaida Martynovna Portnova was born in 1926, Leningrad, in a working class Belarusian family. Her father worked at the Kirov plant, a huge factory in the middle of the city producing a large portion of Soviet tanks and machinery.
This story begins when Zinaida was in 7th grade. During a trip to Vitebsk region (northern Belarus) to visit her grandmother, the Germans invaded and swiftly captured the entirety of Belarus. They weren’t exactly friendly to the Slavs living there, and stole Zinaida’s Grandma’s Cattle after hitting her to aid the war effort. Zinaida wasn’t a person to be messed with though. In an act of revenge, she decided to join the “Young avengers” squad or (Юные мстители) - a group made up of teenagers aged 14 to 17 old enough and courageous enough to act against the N*zis.
Zinaida’s first jobs were to hand out anti Nazi flyers to the public and smuggle weapons to Hidden adult resistance fighters, but as the girl got older, she began doing riskier tasks.,
In 1943, she eventually ended up going undercover as a cook in the German army. Her food wasn’t the most energizing, though, and 100 Germans would find out the hard ways. You see, she had actually snuck poison into the food, making 100 German soldiers drop dead.
When her commander saw 100 poisoned soldiers on the ground, he first logically suspected Zinaida, the cook, of spiking the food. Zinaida claimed she was innocent and even ate some of the spiked food herself to prove it. A few hours later, at home, she would find herself violently sick.
The culprit of the poisoning would become apparent by the next day for the Germans, because, instead of coming back to work, Zinaida instead chose to flee into the forest far from the crime scene, where she would be recruited as a scout for a partisan unit, led by a man called Kliment Voroshilov at only 17 years of age!
In December 1943, tragedy would strike though, as, during a scouting mission is a city called Obol (controlled by the Germans, the teenage girl would be captured and tortured for info. But it doesn’t end there.
Zinaida, realizing this was her last chance to escape certain death, grabbed the officers pistol, shot him, then ran out of the interrogating room, shot every guard on the way, and got to the exit. She ran into the forest but was recaptured near a riverbank.
Zinaida was then interrogated and tortured for a month, but the Nazis got no information out of her. They would finally decide to execute her by shooting on January 15th, 1944, a month before her 18th birthday.

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