Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya: The Soviet Resistance Fighter Who Became A Martyr
Wikimedia CommonsZoya Kosmodemyanskaya was brutally tortured by Nazi soldiers before her execution.
On November 29, 1941, German soldiers marched 18-year-old Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya to the village center of Petrishchevo in Russia. But as the Nazis tightened a noose around her neck, Kosmodemyanskaya boldly addressed the peasants who were forced to watch her execution.
“Hey, comrades!” Kosmodemyanskaya shouted. “Why are you looking so sad? Be brave, fight, beat the Germans, burn, wipe them out! I’m not afraid to die, comrades. It is happiness to die for one’s people!”
She continued, now speaking to the German troops who surrounded her, “You hang me now, but I’m not alone. There are two hundred million of us. You can’t hang us all. They will avenge me.”
Finally, Kosmodemyanskaya spoke her last words. Stretching on tiptoe so that she could continue to speak, Kosmodemyanskaya cried: “Farewell, comrades! Fight, do not be afraid! Stalin is with us! Stalin will come!”
And with that, she was hanged. The Nazis left her body in the town square for weeks, where soldiers desecrated her corpse.
Kosmodemyanskaya’s final stand, however, spread swiftly across the Soviet Union, making her a hero to beleaguered people across the country.
Born in 1923, Kosmodemyanskaya became determined to resist Hitler and the Nazis at a young age. As a 10th-grader, she quit school and joined up with Soviet resistance fighters. Quickly, she proved her worth.
Kosmodemyanskaya cut German telephone wires, fired on German troop quarters, and destroyed a Nazi stable in Petrishchevo. But when she tried to destroy another stable, the Nazis caught up to her.
They dragged her to a house in town where the homeowners listened to Kosmodemyanskaya’s responses to her interrogator’s questions: “No, I don’t know,” or “I won’t tell you.” They heard, too, the beginning of her torture.
For hours, the Nazis tried to break Kosmodemyanskaya’s will. They flogged her, punched her, held lit matches to her face, drew a saw across her back, and made her walk barefoot through the snow at bayonet point. Still, Kosmodemyanskaya refused to reveal any information.
Frustrated with their prisoner’s lack of compliance, the Nazis decided to sentence Kosmodemyanskaya to death. They hung a board around her neck that read “Guerrilla” and marched her straight to the gallows.
Though Kosmodemyanskaya died that day, her legacy lived on. When Joseph Stalin heard about her fearlessness and refusal to betray her people, he allegedly remarked: “Here is the people’s heroine.”
Soon afterward, she was declared a “Hero of the Soviet Union.” And even today, decades later, she remains one of Russia’s most respected and revered resistance fighters of World War II.
