When Adolf Hitler marched into Soviet Russia, Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya quit the tenth grade of Moscow's 202nd Secondary School and joined a guerrilla band. Hair-cropped, in men's clothes, tall, 18-year-old Zoya proved an apt recruit: before the Germans captured her, she had cut a German field-telephone wire, fired German troop quarters, destroyed a 20-horse enemy stable.
For hours her captors tried to make her talk. They flogged her with a leather belt, punched her with their fists. They held lighted matches to her chin. They scraped a saw across her back. They walked her, at bayonet point, barefoot through the snow for hours.
Finally they hung a bottle of gasoline and a card inscribed "Guerrilla" about her neck, hustled her off to a gallows in the village square of Petrisheva. Villagers were herded to watch the execution. The Germans stood Zoya on a box, dropped a noose around her neck. A German officer focused his camera.
"Comrades!"cried Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya. "Cheer up! Smite the Germans! Burn them!"
The picture-snapper moved to get a different angle shot.
"Hurry up," snapped the nervous German commandant.
"You hang me now," Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya taunted her captors, "but I am not alone. There are 200,000,000 of us. You won't hang everybody. I shall be avenged. Soldiers! Surrender before it is too late. Victory will be ours."
The officer snapped another picture. The hangman tightened the noose. Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya stretched on tiptoe to shout: "Goodby, Comrades!" The hangman kicked the box and Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya strangled to death.
Last week Moscow told this story and gave Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya* a title: Hero of the Soviet Union.
*Skeptical correspondents were informed that Kosmo and Demyan were both proper first names, which had been combined to make an all-inclusive family name with the feminine ending kaya. Hence, said Moscow, any similarity in pronunciation between Kosmodemyanskaya and "Damyankee" was purely coincidental.