Masha Bruskina

Maria "Masha" Bruskina (Belarusian: Марыя Барысаўна Брускіна Marïya Barïsawna Bruskina; Russian: Мария Борисовна Брускина; 1924 – 26 October 1941 in Minsk[1]), was a Belarusian Jewish teenage nurse and a communist martyr[2] to the anti-fascist resistance during the early years of World War II,[3] as well as a niece of the sculptor and Soviet MP Zair Asgur.

[5]: 85 Masha Bruskina lived in Minsk with her mother, Lucia Moiseyevna Bugakova, senior product manager of the Book Trade Office of the BSSR State Publishing House.

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.

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[6] and Lithuanian auxiliary troops under the command of Major Antanas Impulevičius.

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 Volodya Shcherbatsevich and World War I veteran Kirill Ivanovich Trus.

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.

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.