Picture this. You’re 17 years old. You are sitting in a cold gray room. Across the table sits a Gustapo officer, the most feared interrogator in Nazi occupied Europe. He has a pistol on the desk between you. He leans forward and asks you one more time to give him the names of your friends. You don’t say a word.

 You look at that pistol and then you grab it. That is where this story begins. But what came before that moment and what came after is what will stay with you long after this video ends. My name is host name and this is my history profiles where we don’t just tell you history, we make you feel it. Before we go any further, if you are new here, you are in exactly the right place.

Subscribe to My History Profiles right now. Hit the bell icon and drop the words never broken in the comments. By the end of this video, you’ll know exactly why those two words matter more than anything else. Now, let’s go back to 1941. June 1941, Lenenrad, Soviet Union. Zenida Nova. Everyone called her Zena was 15 years old.

 A 7th grade student at school number 395 in Lenenrad. She was the eldest daughter in a tight-knit workingclass family. Her father worked long shifts at the Kiraov plant, one of the Soviet Union’s largest industrial factories. Her little sister, Galia, was 8 years younger than her, practically a baby by comparison.

 That summer, like millions of Soviet children, Zena was sent away from the city to enjoy the school holidays in the countryside, she and Galia traveled to stay with her grandmother in the tiny village of Zooie near the town of Aul in northern Bellarus, fields, fresh air, a break from city life. She had no idea would be the last normal summer of her life.

 On June 22nd, 1941, Adolf Hitler launched Operation Barbar Roa, the largest military invasion in human history. Three million German soldiers reinforced by Finnish, Romanian, Hungarian, Italian, Slovak, and Croatian troops smashed across the Soviet border simultaneously. Within a single week, German forces had already advanced 200 m into Soviet territory.

 Within months, two tumbered miles into Soviet territory. Within months, 5 million Soviet soldiers were dead, wounded, or captured. The speed was incomprehensible. Stalin reportedly suffered a mental breakdown in the first days of the invasion and went silent for nearly 2 weeks. His generals were in chaos. The country was in freef fall and the German army kept moving east straight toward a small village in northern Bellarus where a 15-year-old girl was staying with her grandmother.

 Here is something textbooks rarely tell you. Hitler did not see operation barbarosa as a normal military campaign. He called it a vernik tongreg, a war of annihilation. The official Nazi policy was to starve, enslave, and ultimately eliminate the Slavic populations of Eastern Europe to create leanm space for German settlers.

 Villages were not just occupied, they were consumed. Food was taken. Livestock was seized. Families were left with nothing. When Nazi soldiers reached Oel and began moving through the surrounding villages, they came to Zena’s grandmother’s house. They wanted the cattle. The old woman objected.

 According to historian Henry Sakaida’s documented account in Heroins of the Soviet Union 1941 to 45, the soldiers struck her grandmother for resisting. [laughter] Zena was standing right there. She watched a German soldier hit an elderly woman for refusing to hand over her cows. That was the moment. Historians, psychologists, and biographers who have studied Porova’s story all point to this single incident as the turning point.

 It wasn’t a political awakening. It wasn’t ideology. It was personal. It was rage. It was a granddaughter watching her grandmother get hit and deciding right then that she was going to do something about it. She was 15. By 1942, a covert underground organization had taken root in Opel.

 Officially, they were part of the commal, the all union Leninist Young Communist League, the Soviet youth political organization. But in the streets, in the forests, in hushed voices, they were known by a name far more fitting, the Young Avengers. Most of their members were teenagers. Some were barely 13. They had no professional military training, no air support, no supply lines.

 What they had was local knowledge, total commitment, and crucially, the fact that no Nazi commander seriously believed a group of children could be running an effective resistance operation. That was their greatest weapon. Zena, now 16, joined in 1942 and immediately became one of the group’s most valuable operatives. She started with intelligence work, slipping Soviet propaganda leaflets under doors in German occupied neighborhoods, tracking the movement of German patrol units and smuggling stolen vermached weapons to Soviet partisan fighters

hiding in the forests. She was quiet. She was careful. She was fearless. Then she leveled up. The older members of the young Avengers, some of them in their early 20s, taught her how to handle firearms and militaryra explosives. Zena used that knowledge immediately. She participated in coordinated sabotage strikes against a local water pump station, a power plant, and a brick factory.

 Infrastructure the German military depended on. These operations combined are estimated to have contributed to the deaths of over 100 German soldiers, 100 killed through the actions of a teenage girl who one year earlier had been studying for seventh grade exams. In 1943, Zena executed what may honestly be one of the most audacious one-woman operations of the entire Second World War.

 She got herself hired as a kitchen aid at the German military canteen in Oel, the facility that fed the entire local Nazi garrison every single day. For weeks, she worked quietly, chopped vegetables, latted out soup, smiled at the soldiers who occupied her homeland, and then in August 1943, she poisoned the food. The exact compound she used has never been fully confirmed in surviving records, but the effect was immediate and devastating.

 Dozens of German soldiers became violently ill. Multiple soldiers died. The garrison was thrown into chaos. The Gustapo immediately rounded up every kitchen worker for interrogation. What Zena did next is the part that still makes historians shake their heads. She told them she was innocent. And then to prove it, she picked up a bowl of the same poison food she had prepared and ate it in front of the German officers calmly without hesitation, watching their faces as she swallowed. They watched her.

 She showed no reaction. They released her. She walked out of that interrogation room and went straight to her grandmother’s house where she collapsed. She spent the next several days fighting through severe vomiting and illness. Kept alive by her grandmother’s herbal remedies and large quantities of whey, a traditional folk treatment, she survived.

 But when she failed to show up for work the next morning, the Germans pieced it together. They launched a full manhunt. Zena disappeared into the forests of Bellarus, joining the armed partisan unit named after Soviet marshal Clement Vorosil, one of Stalin’s original five marshals. She was now a wanted fugitive. She was 17 and she was writing home to her parents in besieged Lenenrad.

 Her letter preserved in Soviet historical archives says, “Mom, we are now in a partisan detachment. Together with you, we will defeat the Nazi invaders.” Read that sentence again. Her parents were trapped inside Linenrad during one of the deadliest sieges in human history, a blockade that would kill over 1 million civilians through starvation alone.

 And Zena’s letter was not asking for help or expressing despair. She was reassuring them. That is the character of this young woman. By late 1943, the Young Avengers network in Oel was falling apart. Members were being captured. Missions were failing. The Gustapo had clearly penetrated the network. Zena was sent back in.

 Her mission, go to Oel, find out what had gone wrong, and make contact with any surviving members. It was her most dangerous assignment yet. Walking back into the exact town where the Nazis already knew her name and her face, [laughter] she was captured almost immediately, betrayed or identified by local informants.

 The Gestapo took her to a facility in the village of Gorani. Two versions of what happened next exist in the historical record, and both have been cited by serious historians. In the first account during her interrogation, the Gustapo officer left his pistol sitting on the table between them. Either a trap or a moment of fatal arrogance.

 Zena grabbed it and shot him dead. When two German soldiers burst through the door, she shot them both and ran. In the second account, the officer slammed the pistol down on the table in a rage while threatening to execute her. She snatched it mid-sentence and opened fire anyway. She shot him, shot a guard in the corridor, and shot another in the courtyard before the weapon misfired at the final guard, blocking her escape.

Both accounts agree. She killed three men and she ran. She made it to the treeine. She ran for a river. The pistol misfired when she needed it most. The Germans caught her at the riverbank. What followed was more than a month of torture. The Gestapo needed names, locations, network contacts, safe houses, supply routes, everything Zena knew about the partisan resistance in northern Bellarus.

 She gave them nothing. Not one name, not one location. Absolute silence. They burned her with hot irons. They drove needles under her fingernails. They gouged out her eyes. By the time they were finished, Zanida Portnova was blind. She was 17 years old, blind, barely able to stand, and she had not broken.

 On January 15th, 1944, the Gustapo loaded her onto a truck and drove her into the forest outside Pelosk. She was executed. She was 26 days away from her 18th birthday. Nazi Germany surrendered on May 8th, 1945. The regime that promised to last a thousand years was gone in 12. Zenida Porto Nova’s name outlasted all of them. On July 1, 1958, 14 years after her execution, the Soviet government postumously awarded her the title of hero of the Soviet Union, the nation’s absolute highest honor.

 She became the youngest woman in Soviet history to ever receive that designation. She was also awarded the Order of Linen, the highest civilian decoration the Soviet Union could give. Today a bust of her face stands in Minsk. An obelisk rises in the village of Abal, a museum on the highway between Palotsk and Vidtubs is dedicated to the Kamsumal underground she served.

Schools across Russia and Bellarus carry her name. A commemorative plaque was unveiled in the village of Zuya, her grandmother’s village where the war first found her in 1969. The Germans tried to erase her. They failed completely. Here is the real story behind this story. Zena was not exceptional because she was born with special gifts.

 She was exceptional because when history arrived at her grandmother’s door and hid an old woman who couldn’t defend herself, she refused to look away. She was a normal girl who made an extraordinary choice and then kept making it every single day until they had to kill her to stop her. That is the kind of courage that does not need a uniform or a rank.

 And that is precisely why 80 years later we are still saying her name. If this story moved you, and I believe it did, here’s what I need from you right now. Like this video so the algorithm shares Zena’s story with more people. Subscribe to My History Profiles because we bring you exactly this, the real, raw, unfiltered stories that history tried to bury.

 And hit that bell so you are first to know when we drop the next one. And in the comments, tell me this. What part of Zena’s story hit you hardest? Was it the poison kitchen, the interrogation room, or the letter she wrote to her parents? Let’s talk about it. I’ll see you in the next one. This is my history profiles and history always has more to