UNKNOWN HEROINE

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 6, Issue 89, 13 July 1943, Page 2

UNKNOWN HEROINE

STORY OF A COURAGEOUS RUSSIAN GIRL THWARTED GERMAN PLAN Thi.s happened at Kislovodsk, Russia. The Germans were retreating from the town, and it. was clear that they could not hope to hold out against the advancing Red Army. As they were leaving they strove to damage this ••famous Soviet health resort in every possible way. They laid; mines under the big buildings, the sanatoria and rest homes, and blew them up. The Red Army was close enough now for the Germans to hear the tanks' guns. Tt was then that people noticed a rather small girl in a brown coat crouching close to the ground by the educational workers' sanatorium. It was hard to imagine what, had, brought her out into this chaos.

The Germans were preparing to blow up the building. Nobody knows what the young girl thought, nobody saw her face, nobody knew her name afterwards. All that was known "was that 'when everything was ready for the explosion, when the dynamite had been laid under the walls, when the German sappers had moved to a.safe distance, this girl went ahead. Nobody paid much attention. She found, the wire the sappers had laid and tried to break it. She worried the cold copper with her teeth, crumpled and. tore at it. Eventually she succeeded. The wire, fel' apart. The Germans, who wfrre waiting for the explosion from a distance of several hundred yards, wondered why nothing happened. Two of them went to- see. They found the girl lying collapsed by the severed wire. She had no strength left to run away. They shot her and bent down to mend the wire. But at that moment a heavy tank, with a little smoke-begrimed red star on the turret, burst into the street. Machine guns rattled. The Germans collapsed in the roadway and the tank rolled over them. The Red Army men found the girl. I who had severed the wire. She was buried very quietly, without speeches, or solemn music. Her face had been smashed up by three bullets, and no one could discover who she was, where she came from or where- she worked. She was bftried in a garden not far from the sanatorium.