Page 104 of Pioneer Summer

Polina’s voice was hoarse from fatigue as she recited, “Zina was tortured for over a month, but she didn’t reveal anything. Soon a new Gestapo officer took over her case, Oberleutnant Krause. He used a different interrogation tactic ...”

The curtain slid away. Some Germans, holding Zina by the arms, brought her onstage and sat her down opposite Yurka.

“My brave Fräulein, I am aware that your parents remain in Leningrad. And I am also aware that your beloved city has fallen. A new flag flies above it. But I assure you that all you have to do is agree to a small compromise and share a few bits of information with Hitler’s army command, and I will personally ensure that such a brave Fräulein as yourself will have a chance to see her family again ...”

Zina didn’t speak. She just looked at him sullenly. Yurka got a heavy pistol out of the table drawer and turned it over in his hands, declaring, “My brave Fräulein, deep in the heart of this small mechanism lies one single solitary round. It is not large. But it is deadly. All my finger has to do is twitch, completely by accident, and there will no longer be any need for long, drawn-out conversations. Ponder this, my brave Fräulein. Your life is priceless, but it would be so easy to simply end it with one careless move ...” Zina gave the pistol a long, pointed look, so the audience would notice. “Ponder this carefully, Fräulein,” Yurka repeated.

He put the pistol down on the table. Without taking his eyes off it, he pulled a pack of cigarettes out of his jacket pocket and extracted a cigarette. Suddenly the silence was broken by a loud shrieking of brakes. Krause/ Yurka started and turned around to face the window drawn on the back wall. As a result, he had turned away from Zina.Come on, Nastya!thought Yurka.Grab the pistol!

But Nastya didn’t. She’d been very concerned about getting this scene right, so finally the confused Yurka turned around to look at her and saw that she was looking out into the audience at Volodya, apparently hoping he would be watching her. But he was watching someone else instead. That someone was Yurka. Volodya was biting his lip and frowning as though something were hurting him, and looking at Yurka with a peculiar look that was heavy, and haggard, and pleading. Yet, when their eyes met, the corners of Volodya’s mouth twitched up for just a second.

Time sped back up. Portnova grabbed the pistol and immediately shot Krause. Yurka collapsed for real, coming down with a crash and hitting the back of his head on the ground. Everyone in the audience gasped. Volodyamade as if to stand up. Trying not to grimace from the pain, Yurka flashed him a smile, indicating that everything was fine. The back of his head sure hurt, though. He’d have a lump there.

Sashka the German came running as soon as he heard the shot. This was his second death scene, and the entire audience clearly knew what was coming next. Portnova’s second bullet got him. While Portnova was stepping over the moaning German soldier, more of them came running onstage, holding their automatic rifles at the ready. Portnova took off running, but the sound of shots rang out and she fell down. She had been shot in the legs. She had left a bullet for herself, so Zina pressed the barrel of the gun to her heart and pulled the trigger, but it didn’t fire. She didn’t get a chance to try again: the Germans grabbed her and pulled her offstage. The curtain closed as Masha started playing the “Internationale.”

“Ready to paint, girls?” Yurka asked as he got up. The actors nodded and sat Nastya/Portnova down in the chair they’d prepared for her, then laid clear plastic sheeting over her clothes and quickly painted white gouache paint over her hair and gray paint on her eyes.

The stage decorations for the execution were quick to set up: the crew just added a drawing of a brick wall to the village scene background that was already on the backdrop. That was all—that was the entire set for the last scene of the show. The extras playing villagers went to stand out along the edges while the Germans gathered in the middle, near the execution wall.

Vanka, who was supposed to go get Portnova and lead her to be executed, was standing with the extras, daydreaming. Yurka muttered a curse and hissed his name as loud as he dared. He didn’t notice. His neighbors tugged on his sleeves and he looked at Yurka, but it was too late: the curtain had already opened. Yurka cursed again, grabbed Krause’s uniform jacket from off the back of a chair, and put it on, and then he, not Vanka, led Portnova to her execution.

Polina narrated: “In the torture chambers of the Polotsk prison, Zina was put through agony: her tormentors put needles under her fingernails, and burned her with hot irons, and poked out her eyes, but Zina withstood all these tortures and never gave up her comrades or her motherland. Although she was blind, she used a nail to scratch a picture on the wall of her cell: aheart over a little girl with braids and the caption ‘sentenced to death.’ On the morning of January tenth, 1944, after a month of torture, seventeen-year-old Zina, who had been blinded and whose hair had gone completely gray, was led to her execution.”

Nastya walked over to the wall, limping and stumbling. Yurka had insisted she limp, since Zina had been shot in both legs and it was unlikely she had been given medical care. Portnova stood with her back to the wall, Yurka was given a toy rifle, and the sound of automatic rifle fire rang out. Zina fell.

There was complete silence in the audience and onstage. Masha held the pause, then started playing the Moonlight Sonata.

Polina said the words that brought the show to a close: “Two thousand German soldiers had been billeted in Obol, where the Young Avengers and Zina Portnova lived. Members of the underground had located the German gun positions, counted their soldiers, and tracked their movements. Over the course of their operations, several dozen enemy troop trains, with all their ammunition, equipment, and manpower, were prevented from reaching the front. Hundreds of vehicles used by the German military were blown up by mines laid by the Young Avengers. Five key infrastructure enterprises that were going to be utilized by the Germans were destroyed. In the Obol garrison, several thousand of Hitler’s men met death at the Young Avengers’ hands. ‘It’s as terrible here as it is at the front,’ one German soldier wrote home.

“Thirteen million children died in the Great Fatherland War. Of the thirty-eight Young Avengers, thirty were executed. Ilya Yezavitov and Yefrosinya Zenkova remained among the living. Zinaida Martynovna Portnova was posthumously named a Pioneer Hero by the Vladimir Lenin All-Union Pioneer Organization in 1954. On July first, 1958, by decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, she was posthumously named Hero of the Soviet Union and awarded the Order of Lenin.”

Polina walked offstage. The curtain closed. After a few moments of silence, the theater erupted in thunderous applause.

The audience was gone. The only people still in the theater were the cast and the administration. Yurka, dejectedly surveying the mess left backstage after the show, wondered who would pick it all up, and when.

But right now there wasn’t time for that. Volodya, Olga Leonidovna, and Pal Palych came onstage to join the actors. The educational specialist beamed in satisfaction. “Great job, everyone! The show turned out very well! I thought it’d be much worse, given how little time you had,” she praised them. But then she had to sour it all by adding: “I have just one observation, but it’s very important: it looked like your Portnova didn’t leave to join the partisans, but ran away in shame after she betrayed her comrades.”

Yurka’s right nostril twitched. He was barely able to keep from telling her what he thought of her. That Olga Leonidovna, she sure knew how to spoil the mood! But Volodya’s exhausted look brought him back into line immediately.

The camp director, on the other hand, was openly delighted. “Hem ...” He clapped his hands. “Your performance was excellent. Good work! I especially noted the success of the scene where the factories get blown up. Whose idea was that?”

Several people looked at Yurka, but he shrugged: “We all came up with it together.”

“Hem ... Fine, very fine. Good teamwork is doubly good!”

“Yes, Volodya, you’ve done great work!” Olga Leonidovna went all nice again. “You succeeded in gathering and organizing everyone ...”

“Thank you, of course, but this was all a shared effort,” replied Volodya. “You helped a lot with the extras, too, Olga Leonidovna, but I just sat the whole show out in the audience.”

“We couldn’t have done it without Yurka!” Ulyana interjected suddenly. “He was running his feet off backstage, helping everyone and making sure everything was running smoothly!”

“And he played the piano really beautifully!” Polina said encouragingly.

“And he kept his head when Vanka kept not shooting Zina!” added Ksyusha.

Yurka was stunned at first but then felt the color flooding his cheeks. He was only rarely praised, and never in front of the administration, and definitely never by the Pukes! Without knowing how to react, he looked helplessly at Volodya, who was smiling.

“That’s right, Konev, this is a pleasant surprise! Not like last year,” said Olga Leonidovna. “Friendship with Volodya is having a positive effect on you!”

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