Zinaida Nikodimova

In April 1944, seven-year-old Zina was deported with around thirty other children to Germany. According to her testimony, she stayed in Belzig, where she later recalled: “In Belzig we had a supervisor, Mrs. Zandrich. She was the cruelest. We were beaten there. If someone spoke a Russian word, they beat us. When I returned home, I spoke German.” Later publications suggest that she was selected for Nazi Germanisation because of her blond hair and blue eyes and given the German name “Sigrid.” However, no surviving archival documents have confirmed that she was held in the SS children’s home (“SS-Heimschule”) in Belzig or that she received this German name.

As the front approached, the children were evacuated further west before being liberated by the Red Army near Retzow in May 1945. Zinaida was transferred to a children’s home in the Kuibyshev Region of the Soviet Union. Meanwhile, her mother, former resistance fighter Chasia Pruslina, searched across Germany for her daughter while helping locate other abducted Soviet children. On 12 August 1947, mother and daughter were reunited after more than three years apart. Zinaida later became a physician in Minsk and recorded her testimony for the USC Shoah Foundation in 1997.