Partisan Paraded through the Streets
Maria 'Masha' Bruskina was a 17-year-old Jewish member of the Minsk Resistance during World War II. She volunteered as a nurse at the hospital in the Polytechnic Institute, which had been set up to care for wounded members of the Red Army. 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 14 October 1941.
Local German authorities 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 plaque around her neck which read, in both German and Russian: 'We are partisans and have shot at German troops'. Members of the resistance were made to wear similar signs whether or not they had actually shot at German troops. She and her two comrades were hanged in public on Sunday, 26 October 1941, in front of 'Minsk Kristall' a yeast brewery and distillery plant. The Germans let the bodies hang for three full days before allowing them to be cut down and buried.