Into Occupied Territory
When Zinaida Portnova left Leningrad in 1941 to stay with her grandmother in the Vitebsk region, she stepped into an area that would soon fall under German occupation. She had just completed seventh grade when the invasion reached Belarus.
After a German soldier struck her grandmother while confiscating cattle, she reacted with a determination that set the path for everything that followed. At fifteen she entered a world of clandestine activity that placed her inside the Belarusian resistance.
Joining the Young Avengers
In 1942 Portnova became part of the Young Avengers, a local underground Komsomol group based in Obol. Her early responsibilities included distributing Soviet leaflets, passing information on troop movements, and gathering weapons. Older members trained her in the use of explosives and firearms.
She then joined acts of sabotage against a pump, a power plant, and a brick factory. Contemporary estimates credited these actions with causing significant German casualties. Her ability to move unnoticed as a young girl allowed her to operate in places where older partisans would have been questioned.
The Poisoning at Obol
In 1943 Portnova found work as a kitchen aide for the German garrison in Obol. In August she added poison to the food prepared for the troops. When suspicion fell on her she tasted the meal to prove her innocence. The effects appeared later and she became severely ill before recovering after drinking whey. Her absence from work alerted the Germans, who connected her illness with the incident.
She avoided capture by joining a partisan detachment named after Kliment Voroshilov and worked as a scout. That same month she wrote to her parents in besieged Leningrad, telling them she was in a partisan group and fighting the occupation. In October 1943 she was accepted into the VLKSM.
Capture and Final Resistance
Late in 1943 or early in 1944 she returned to Obol on a mission to find out why several partisan operations had failed. She was captured soon after her arrival. Accounts of her attempted escape differ, but both describe the same sequence. During an interrogation she seized the pistol of the Gestapo officer questioning her and shot him. She also shot two German soldiers who responded to the noise.
She tried to flee toward a nearby river but was caught. After her recapture she was interrogated and subjected to torture. She died on 15 January 1944 at the age of seventeen, either during torture or shortly before being taken to the forest where she was executed.
Zinaida Portnova was only a teenager when she stepped into occupied Belarus and entered a hidden world of danger.
Her path led from harmless errands to sabotage and finally to a violent escape attempt that shocked her captors…🧵👇 pic.twitter.com/HgzasKN6Q4
— Fascinating True Stories (@FascinatingTrue) November 14, 2025