Hasya Mendelevna Pruslina was born on 20 January 1901 in the village of Gorbachevo, Polotsk Uyezd, Vitebsk Governorate, into a large Jewish family. Her father, Mendel Borukh, was a hereditary tailor; her mother, Dina Khaya, kept the household. A childhood photograph from 1911 captured the future underground activist standing beside her brothers Zalman, Meir, and Matvei: a slender girl with an attentive gaze, already distinguished even then by her inner strength and determination; the eldest daughter, who from an early age helped her parents in their difficult daily life.
In 1912, Hasya completed a three-year primary school, after which she was forced for a long time to help her father in his trade. But from an early age she was drawn to knowledge, and in 1920 she persuaded her parents to let her go to Vitebsk to pursue an education. There, Hasya studied for a year at a technical college, but concluded that an institute would offer greater prospects. To gain admission, she had to pass fourteen (!) exams externally: she had no formal secondary education, but she read extensively and possessed a truly phenomenal memory.
At that time, the Belorussian SSR was enlarged — the Vitebsk region became part of the republic, and the local institute was subordinated to the Belorussian State University in Minsk. As a result, Hasya was automatically enrolled at BSU, in the Faculty of Education. After graduating, she worked for five years as a history teacher at the Minsk Pedagogical Technical School.
Her successful teaching experience and genuine interest in history determined her next step: admission to postgraduate studies in the history of the peoples of the USSR. Alongside her studies, Hasya Pruslina taught history at the Communist University and at the Minsk Medical Institute. On the eve of the war, she requested leave in order to complete her dissertation; she managed to write three chapters. The text later burned… Hasya’s personal happiness was her children: her son May and her daughter Dina.
The war burst into Hasya Pruslina’s life, as it did into the lives of millions of Soviet people, like a devastating hurricane. In the very first days of the war, Hasya left the burning city with her children. They headed east, toward Borisov, but were unable to get far: German tanks cut off the road. Refugees were strafed from the air; many were killed — they were forced to turn back. Until October, the Pruslinas remained in the area of Uzda, a small town seventy kilometers southwest of Minsk. But they had to leave there as well: the threat loomed that they would be handed over to the occupiers.
Captured as early as 28 June, Minsk was unrecognizable: the house where the Pruslinas had lived was destroyed, and their relatives had been forced into the ghetto, which had been established in July by order of the Nazis in the area of Jubilee Square. More than one hundred thousand people — the entire Jewish population of Minsk and its surroundings — were herded into a territory of just over two square kilometers. The ghetto was surrounded by a high fence of barbed wire and wooden boards; entrances and exits were guarded by patrols. Inside, there was extreme overcrowding, hunger, and disease.
Courageous and energetic, even in such horrific conditions Hasya Pruslina did not break down: from the very first moments she began fighting for her children. She led four-year-old Dina beyond the ghetto’s boundaries and asked an acquaintance to take her in — fortunately, her daughter did not outwardly differ from Belarusian children. Her name, however, was slightly changed just in case — from Dina to Zina. In 1942, the girl was transferred to the Zhdanovichi orphanage near Minsk — survival was easier in the countryside. Many years later, Zinaida recalled: “They let us into some kind of room where there was a large trough filled with boiled potatoes in their skins. How we threw ourselves at them! We didn’t peel them, we just grabbed and ate, grabbed and ate…”
And Hasya remained in the ghetto with her eleven-year-old son, May. Its inmates awaited another “aktion” every day, as the Nazis cynically called the mass killings. And that ожидание, as Hasya later recalled, was almost worse than death itself. Later she described in detail the horrors she had witnessed. During the “aktion” of 20 November 1941, the Nazis drove a column of twelve thousand people toward the Kalvaryja Cemetery, where pits and machine guns had been prepared in advance. Small children were impaled on bayonets and thrown over the fence; the wounded who crawled out from beneath the bodies were burned, doused with phosphorus.
During the final pogrom, on 29 December 1942, able-bodied inmates were kept at work, while in the ghetto the methodical extermination of everyone else began. On that day, all the hospital’s patients were killed as well (except for those with typhus — the perpetrators were afraid to enter). Seven toddlers were in the children’s ward. The police chief Riebe put on white gloves, took a knife, and methodically slaughtered them all; he then walked out, removed his gloves, lit a cigarette, and ate a chocolate bar.
The most terrible “aktion” for Hasya took place on the night of 6–7 November 1941. To escape the pogroms, ghetto residents hid in special shelters known as “malinas.” Most often these were specially dug and camouflaged pits where people crammed themselves like herrings in a barrel and, holding their breath, waited for the Nazis to finish the massacre. Hasya’s eleven-year-old son May was gravely ill with encephalitis and screamed loudly during attacks. Hasya could not take him with her into the “malina.” Until the very last moment, the woman hoped that even such monsters would not raise their hand against a sick, helpless boy. They did… People standing beside the grieving mother kissed her hands and begged her not to cry out…
That terrible night became a point of no return for Hasya. It became clear: it was no longer possible to wait silently for death. If she were to die, it would be with a weapon in her hands. To die — but to avenge May… And soon her prewar connections and unbending will made her one of the key figures in the emerging anti-fascist underground.
At the request of one of the leaders of the Minsk underground, Mikhail Gebelev, Hasya Pruslina headed a so-called “ten” in the “Russian” district of the city (outside the ghetto). She acted as a liaison between the ghetto, the Russian districts, and the forming partisan groups. With a forged passport in the name of Pelageya Petrovna Fedyuk, she was able to move around the city with relative freedom. Even so, it was mortally dangerous: roundups and document checks were carried out systematically, and Hasya’s appearance could betray her origin. In essence, she risked her life every single day.
Her apartment, and later other safe houses, became nerve centers of underground activity. Polya (Hasya’s underground codename) organized meeting points and provided safe overnight shelter for leaders of the Minsk underground — I. Kovalyov (“Nevsky”), D. Korotkevich, and N. Shugaev. The underground members lived in constant anxious expectation, changing locations daily, and such “islands” of relative safety were vital for them.
Hasya helped create “tens” in the Russian districts and recruited police officers sympathetic to the resistance. She organized escapes from the ghetto and passed on information about German troop movements and impending punitive operations.
One of the underground’s most important tasks was work with the population. Hasya carried out agitation, distributed leaflets and bulletins from the Soviet Information Bureau, which were printed in an underground press. The fearless woman personally delivered heavy printing type to the partisans in the forest.
Hasya’s brother, Matvei Pruslin, became the head of a “ten” in the Jewish district. Circumstances unfolded in such a way that he, too, had to return to Minsk — to the ghetto; later, Matvei left it to join a partisan detachment. There he carried out combat missions and in April 1942 was captured by the Nazis. Matvei Pruslin was executed together with his comrades. His wife and children, who had remained in the Minsk ghetto, also perished: they were taken to Trostenets directly in a gas van. Matvei met his death without ever learning this…
The apogee of Hasya’s underground activity was an extraordinarily dangerous mission in the summer of 1942. The Minsk underground city committee, which needed to establish direct contact with the partisan leadership and the Minsk underground regional committee, assigned this task to Hasya Pruslina and Anna Yezubchik. They were to travel hundreds of kilometers through occupied territory, pass numerous German garrisons and checkpoints, in order to reach the partisan zone in the Lyuban marshes of Polesia. The women were provided with forged passes and cover stories about searching for relatives. Hasya sewed three tiny notes containing information for the partisans into her dress.
The journey, which began on 25 August 1942, proved incredibly difficult. At a checkpoint near the village of Buda Hreskaya, the police chief scrutinized their documents for a long time, turning the passport over in his hands and studying Hasya’s face. They slipped through by a miracle. For more than two weeks the courageous women traveled on foot, bypassing garrisons and spending nights in swampy forests. Their legs swelled and became covered with sores.
On 11 September 1942, they finally delivered the documents and oral messages to the command of the partisan formation — V. Kozlov — and his deputy, Major General M. Konstantinov. The feat of Hasya and Anna is difficult to overestimate.
The return to Minsk turned into a nightmare. I. Kovalyov, who had sent Hasya and Anna on their “assignment,” was captured by the Nazis. Within hours of his arrest, the Minsk underground was crushed, and Hasya herself narrowly avoided a roundup. After several unsuccessful attempts to contact those who had remained at large, she was forced to leave for the forest for good — joining the partisan formation under the command of I. Varvashenya, which operated in the south of the Minsk region.
Among the partisans, Hasya Pruslina first worked as a nurse in a field hospital, selflessly caring for the wounded. Later she edited a partisan newspaper, and from the autumn of 1943 she took part in preparing leaflets and distributing them in Minsk: by that time, the anti-fascist underground in the city had been revived.
On 3 July 1944, Soviet troops liberated Minsk, and by August — the entire territory of the Belorussian SSR. It seemed that the anxieties and horrors of the occupation were behind them, along with the daily risk in the underground and the partisan detachment. But the joyful event was overshadowed by a new tragedy: Hasya could not find her daughter anywhere…
In time, she picked up Zina’s trail. It turned out that just one month before the liberation of Minsk, her daughter, together with a group of other “gifted and healthy Soviet children,” had been taken to Germany for Germanization. First, the children were transported to Lithuania, to the settlement of Raudondvaris (Red Manor) near Kaunas. There, in the confiscated castle of Count Tyszkiewicz, a special SS children’s home, the “Heimschule” (SS-Heimschule), had been established. This was not merely an educational institution, but part of the SS ideological machine, intended for the “racial re-education” of children of “desirable blood” (in this case Slavic), who were to be stripped of their identity, language, and memory and turned into loyal Germans.
Retreating under the blows of the Soviet forces, the Germans took the children with them; their route ran through East Prussia, western Poland, Pomerania, and Berlin. Four weeks before the capture of the German capital, Zina was in the town of Belzig, not far from Potsdam, but there her trail disappeared. From that moment on, Hasya’s life became an endless journey through official offices and institutions.
Her first desperate appeal is dated 23 September 1945 and was addressed to G. Malenkov, Secretary of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks):
“I am appealing to you, Comrade Malenkov! Help me in my grief, help me find my only daughter… The Germans killed my son, hanged my brother… and took my seven-year-old daughter to Germany. You can now understand my sorrow… I have literally lost my head from grief — what am I to do? I spared nothing for the Motherland… I made so many sacrifices. I ask only one thing — help me find my daughter, my only child… I beg you to give me the opportunity to go to Germany to bring my daughter back.”
Hasya Pruslina submitted similar requests to the People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs and to the NKGB — without result. Everywhere she received coldly laconic replies: “not on record,” “no information available.” Permission to travel abroad was also withheld for a long time.
Only in 1947 Hasya did finally receive authorization to travel to the Soviet occupation zone in Germany. There she launched a real investigation. Hasya was not simply searching for her daughter — she took up the issue of repatriated Soviet children and literally bombarded officials with written appeals. These documents are a kind of alarm bell, testimony to the urgency and gravity of the problem. In a statement to the military commandant of Camp No. 226, Yanovitsky, dated 19 July 1947, Hasya described the grim reality: “My search for my daughter in Germany has led me to conclude that there are quite a few Soviet children here. They have been Germanized, given German names, intimidated, and out of fear the children do not admit that they are Russian; moreover, the Germans do not want to release them. Special measures are needed to identify and retrieve our children…”
Hasya even addressed the listeners of Radio Volga in Berlin — she shared with them the story of her search for her daughter and spoke about the repatriated Soviet children whom she had managed to find.
The culmination of the search turned into bitter irony. It emerged that as early as October 1945, Zina had been sent… to the USSR.
On 25 October 1945, while Hasya Pruslina was only beginning her fruitless rounds of Minsk offices, Transport No. 51400 had already been assembled in Germany. As was later discovered in the archives of the Office of the Plenipotentiary for Repatriation Affairs in Berlin, Zina’s name was listed among its passengers. This transport, carrying a group of Soviet children found in the Soviet occupation zone, was sent deep into the interior — to the Kuibyshev Region of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. Children arriving from abroad were considered potential carriers of infectious diseases and were subject to prolonged quarantine in special institutions far from major cities. Many of them, especially the younger ones — Germanized and intimidated — could not name not only their address but even their real name or place of birth. Zina ended up in Orphanage No. 2 in the village of Podsolnechnoye, Petrovsky District, Kuibyshev Region, where she remained for nearly two years.