“You can’t hang 190 million of us,” 18-year-old Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya jeered at German soldiers as she was placed on a stack of boxes under a simple gallows on Saturday, November 29th, 1941. A Russian partisan and member of the Soviet secret police, she was betrayed after setting fire to a strategically important building in a village near Moscow during the German occupation, and tortured before being sentenced to death.

The Germans placed a sign around her neck detailing the reasons for her public hanging and left her partly clothed body to rot in the snow. She was posthumously decorated a Hero of the Soviet Union.

Vera Voloshina, 23, a pretty blonde, served in the same partisan group as Zoya. She was wounded in the shoulder during a gunfight with German solders and captured. She too was tortured before being publicly hanged later the same day as Zoya.