Peter Lidov was a war correspondent during the Great Patriotic War. He was the first to investigate and report on Zoya’s deeds, writing articles that shook the entire Soviet Union and even the world, describing Zoya’s heroic struggle. He once told Zoya’s mother: “After the war ends, I will definitely write a very thick book, a good book recounting Zoya’s heroism,” but in 1944, Lidov was killed on the front lines. Zoya’s brother Shura wrote in a letter to their mother: “…Peter Lidov sacrificed himself! Sacrificed on the eve of victory, it’s really regrettable. He was killed near the Pertsovka airfield: he ran out from behind a cover to see how soldiers counterattacked the enemy planes. He was going to write a documentary report about the soldiers, so he wanted to see everything with his own eyes. He was a true military journalist, and a true person…” After hearing about Zoya’s deeds from an old farmer, Lidov set out for Peryshevo village to conduct detailed interviews and investigations. At that time, Zoya’s identity was not yet confirmed; “Danya” was the name she gave herself, derived from the heroine Tatyana Solomakha (Tanya), who had sacrificed her life in the domestic war, initially translated as Danya in our country. Below is Lidov’s initial report on Zoya’s deeds.
In early December 1941, near Peryshevo village in Veleya, the Germans executed an eighteen-year-old Komsomol member from Moscow. She called herself Danya (Таня, Tanya).
That was the most dangerous time in Moscow. The villa areas around Gorizentno and Shodnya had become battlegrounds. Moscow was mobilizing brave volunteers to send them to the front to support guerrilla fighters behind enemy lines. At that time, in Peryshevo, someone cut all German field telephone lines. Soon after, a German troop stable was burned down, and all seventeen horses inside were killed. The next night, the guerrilla fighters were captured.
From the conversations of German soldiers, the farmers of Peryshevo learned what had happened.
He infiltrated near an important military target. Wearing a hat, a fur short coat, cotton trousers, and felt boots, with a satchel on his shoulder, he approached the target. He put the Nagant pistol into his pocket, took a bottle of gasoline from his bag, poured it on the ground, and bent down to strike a match.
At that moment, a sentry quietly approached from behind and embraced him. The guerrilla pushed the German away, drew his pistol, but did not have time to shoot. The soldier knocked the weapon out of his hand and raised the alarm.
The guerrilla was taken to a house where an officer was staying. Only then did people see clearly—it was a girl, very young, tall, well-proportioned, with a pair of black eyes, and dark short hair combed up.
The owner of the house was ordered to go to the kitchen, but they still heard the officer questioning Danya and her quick, unwavering answers: “No,” “I don’t know,” “I won’t say,” “No.” Then the sound of a belt whistling through the air, hitting her body. A few minutes later, a young officer ran from the house to the kitchen, holding his head with both hands, sitting there until the interrogation ended, eyes closed, ears blocked.
The house owner was beaten with a whip about two hundred times, but Danya did not scream.
Later, when asked again, she answered: “No,” “I won’t say,” but her voice was a bit lower than before.
After the interrogation, Danya was taken to Vasily Alexandrovich Kulik’s house. She no longer had felt boots, a hat, or warm clothes. She was brought in wearing only a shirt and underwear, barefoot on the snow.
When she was brought into the house, the host saw a deep blue-black mark on her forehead and bruises on her hands and feet under the light.
Her hands were tied behind her back with a rope. Her lips were bitten and swollen. Probably during the beating, she bit her lips to keep silent.
She sat on a bench. A German sentry stood at the door, with another soldier beside him. Vasily and Praskovia Kulik lay on the stove, watching the prisoner. She sat quietly, motionless; after a while, she asked for water. Vasily Kulik got off the stove, just as he reached the water bucket, the sentry pushed him away.
“Do you want to get a beating too?” he asked fiercely.
The soldier living in the house surrounded the girl, mocking her loudly. Some punched her, some brought a lit match to her chin, and others scratched her back with a saw.
After enough torture, the soldiers went to sleep. The sentry raised his rifle and ordered Danya to get up and leave the house. He pushed her along the street, almost pressing the bayonet against her back, then shouted: “Zurück!”—and took the girl back.
Barefoot, only in underwear, she walked back and forth in the snow until her tormentors, unable to bear the cold, decided to return to the warm house.
This sentry guarded from 10 p.m. to 2 a.m., bringing her outside every half hour or hour, standing in the snow for fifteen to twenty minutes. Finally, the shift changed. The new sentry took his position, allowing the unfortunate girl to lie on the bench.
Taking this opportunity, Praskovia Kulik spoke to Danya:
“Whose family are you from?”
“Why do you ask?”
“Where are you from?”
“I come from Moscow.”
“Are your parents still alive?”
The girl did not answer. She lay there until dawn, motionless, without saying a word, not even groaning, even though her feet were frostbitten and must have hurt.
No one knew whether she slept that night; no one knew what she was thinking during the enemy’s encirclement.
In the morning, the soldiers set up a gallows in the village center.
Praskovia spoke again to the girl:
“Was it you who did that last night?”
“Was I… burned by the Germans?”
“No.”
“Unfortunately… what did they burn?”
“Their horses. People say they also burned weapons…”
At 10 a.m., the officers arrived. The oldest one asked Danya in Russian:
“Tell me, who are you?”
Danya did not answer.
“Tell me, where is Stalin?”
“Stalin is at his post,” Danya replied. The subsequent interrogation the house owners did not hear—they were ordered to leave the room and only allowed back after the interrogation ended.
They brought some of Danya’s belongings from the headquarters: a jacket, trousers, long socks. Her hat, fur short coat, and felt boots were gone—they had already been distributed by the soldiers. Next to her was her satchel, containing a bottle of gasoline, matches, Nagant pistol bullets, sugar, and salt. Tatyana was dressed in her clothes, and the house owner helped her put the socks on her blackened feet. Then they hung the bottle of gasoline on her chest and attached a sign that read: “Guerrilla fighter.” They took her to the square, where a gallows had already been erected.
Around the execution site stood ten cavalrymen with drawn sabers. Over a hundred German soldiers and several officers surrounded the area. The local residents were ordered to watch the execution, but few came; some watched for a while and then quietly went home, unwilling to witness this terrible scene.
A noose was hung from the beam, with two empty wooden boxes underneath. Danya was lifted up, standing on the boxes, with the noose around her neck. An officer raised a “Kodak” camera, aiming at the gallows—Germans liked to photograph executions. The commander signaled the executioner to wait.
Danya seized this moment to shout loudly to the collective farm men and women:
“Comrades! Why are you looking with frowns? Be brave! Fight! Beat the Germans! Burn them! Poison them!”
A German soldier standing nearby raised his hand, wanting to hit her or cover her mouth, but she pushed his hand away and continued:
“Comrades! I am not afraid to die. Dying for my people—this is happiness…”
The photographer finished shooting the wide and close-up shots, now preparing to shoot from the side. The executioner looked anxiously at the commander, who shouted to the photographer:
“Hurry up!”
At this moment, Danya turned to the commander and German soldiers and said:
“You will hang me now, but I am not alone—we have two hundred million people, and you cannot hang us all. You will pay for me…”
The Russians in the square cried. Some turned their faces away, unwilling to watch what was about to happen.
The executioner tightened the rope, choking Danya. But she pushed the noose apart with her hands, stood on tiptoe, and shouted with all her strength:
“Goodbye, comrades! Fight, don’t be afraid! Stalin is with us! Stalin will come!..”
The executioner kicked the wooden box with his iron-booted foot. The box slid on the packed snow, and the top box fell heavily to the ground. The crowd stepped back. Someone shouted, and the echo reverberated in the woods…
She died on the fascist gallows, enduring torture without a cry or betraying her comrades. She accepted martyrdom like a hero, like the daughter of a great nation—this nation will never be defeated by anyone. People will forever remember her!
On New Year’s Eve, drunken fascist soldiers surrounded the gallows, stripped the clothes from the corpse, and vilely insulted the body. Her body was hung again in the village center for a day, riddled with stab wounds. Until the evening of January 1st, the Germans ordered the gallows to be sawed down. The village chief gathered the people and dug a pit in the frozen ground.
Danya was buried outside the village, under a weeping willow, with no ceremony. The snowstorm quickly covered the small mound.
Soon after, those who had opened the way for her in the dark December night came here.
When the soldiers stopped here to rest, they would come to her grave, bow deeply, and thank her sincerely as a Russian; thank her parents for bringing this hero into the world; thank her teachers for educating her; thank her comrades for strengthening her spirit.
Her immortal glory will spread across the entire Soviet land; millions will remember her with love, thinking of that distant, snow-covered grave; and Stalin will also come to this grave in his heart, visiting his loyal daughter.
— Pravda
January 27, 1942