Maria “Masha” Bruskina was a Belarusian Jewish teenage nurse and a communist martyr to the anti-fascist resistance during the early years of World War II, as well as a niece of the sculptor and Soviet MP Zair Asgur.
While volunteering as a nurse, she cared for wounded Red Army soldiers, and assisted them in escaping then Nazi-occupied Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic.
For this, she and 11 other communists of the anti-fascist underground were imprisoned, tortured, and when the teenagers refused to reveal any secrets, was publicly executed by the German Wehrmacht.
She volunteered as a nurse at the hospital in the Minsk Polytechnic Institute, which had been set up to care for members of the Red Army wounded while defending what was then the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic against the planned genocide of the indigenous Slavic peoples by 3.8 Million Nazi and Finnish troops, a military escalation that remains the largest land invasion in history.
In addition to caring for the soldiers, she helped them escape by smuggling civilian clothing and false identity papers into the hospital.
A patient told the Germans what Bruskina was doing, and she was arrested on October 14, 1941, by members of the Nazi Army’s 707th Infantry Division and 2nd Schutzmannschaft Battalion and Lithuanian auxiliary troops under the command of Major Antanas Impulevičius.
A Red Army soldier, Boris Mikhailovich Rudzyanko, denounced Masha Bruskina and eleven other partisans. Rudzyanko was known for treachery and his role is the mass killing of Jews in the following years was evidence. After being arrested, Bruskina wrote a letter to her mother on October 20, 1941.
I am tormented by the thought that I have caused you great worry. Don’t worry. Nothing bad has happened to me. I swear to you that you will have no further unpleasantness because of me. If you can, please send me my dress, my green blouse, and white socks. I want to be dressed decently when I leave here.
The German Nazi invaders decided on a public hanging to make an example of Bruskina, along with two other members of the resistance, 16-year-old Volodia Shcherbatsevich and World War I veteran Kiril Trus. Before being hanged, she was paraded through the streets with a placard around her neck which read, in both German and Russian:
We are partisans and have shot at German troops”, the latter which had of course never actually occurred, Masha having been a nurse. Members of the resistance were routinely made to wear similar signs whether or not they had actually shot at German troops as a display of power and authority by the Nazi invaders, theoretically demonstrating their total control of the occupied nation and its peoples.
She and her two comrades were hanged in public on Sunday, October 26, 1941, in front of Minsk Kristall, a yeast brewery and distillery plant on Nizhne-Lyahovskaya Street (15 Oktyabrskaya Street today). The German Nazi authorities would not allow the victims to be cut down and buried for three days, during which time the bodies were displayed publicly as a warning to other anti-fascists, Jews and Communists.
A witness of the execution said:
When they put her on the stool, the girl turned her face toward the fence. The executioners wanted her to stand with her face to the crowd, but she turned away and that was that. No matter how much they pushed her and tried to turn her, she remained standing with her back to the crowd. Only then did they kick away the stool from under her.
Olga Shcherbatsevich, the mother of executed 16-year-old activist Volodia Shcherbatsevich, was hanged the same day along with 10 other members of the Soviet anti-fascist resistance in front of what is now the National Academy of Sciences of Belarus.
The bodies were left hanging for three days, until a German car stopped on October 28. A German soldier ordered two Jews to cut the ropes and load the bodies into the back of a truck.
For decades after the war, Bruskina was officially referred to only as “the unknown girl”, allegedly due to antisemitism from Soviet authorities. Up to 2009, Bruskina’s name was not acknowledged on the memorial plaque at the execution place. However, since 2009, a new memorial plaque at the execution place has been placed.
The Russian inscription now reads “Here on October 26, 1941 the Fascists executed the Soviet patriots K. I. Truss, V. I. Sherbateyvich and M. B. Bruskina”. Bruskina was first recognized in the 1960s, as most of her family and friends had been killed in the Minsk Ghetto.A monument for Bruskina was erected in HaKfar HaYarok in Israel, and a street was named after her in Jerusalem.
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