Mariya Kislyak (1925 - 1943)

Fri Mar 06, 1925

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Mariya Kislyak, born on this day in 1925, was a Soviet partisan and the leader of a Kharkov underground Komsomol cell where she seduced and killed Nazi officers, actions for which she was executed by the Gestapo at the age of seventeen.

Kislyak was born to a Ukrainian peasant family in the village of Lednoe. She graduated from medical training for paramedics and housewives the day before the German invasion of the Soviet Union. During fighting in her hometown, a wounded Soviet soldier she had been taking care of asked her why the city didn’t have a strong partisan movement.

When the soldier recovered, Kislyak contacted several partisans hiding out in a nearby forest and asked if she could join their cause, recruiting several acquaintances into the movement. With this organization, she helped kill Nazi officers, sometimes flirting with them to lure them into an isolated area where they could be killed out of sight.

When she received word that a Gestapo agent nicknamed “the Butcher” would be coming to Kharkiv, she and her partisan unit spent two days planning his capture. Kislyak rented a room right next to his at the farm he was staying at.

After courting him for a few days, Mariya lured him to a riverbank, where her conspirators captured him. After interrogating the officer, the group summarily executed him with a crowbar.

In response, more than one hundred villagers, including Mariya, were collectively arrested by the Gestapo and told they would be killed by a firing squad if the SS man wasn’t found alive soon. After the plot became known, Mariya and two others were brutally tortured and interrogated for weeks.

On June 18th, the group of three was hanged and their bodies put on public display. On May 8th, 1965, she was posthumously awarded the title Hero of the Soviet Union.

  • shatterling@lemm.ee
    4·
    9 months ago

    Tortured for 2 weeks and then dead aged 17 on the eastern front. The most grim of times.