Masha Bruskina

Soviet Belarusian partisan

Maria "Masha" Bruskina ( Marïya Barïsawna Bruskina; Мария Борисовна Брускина; 1924 – 26 October 1941 in Minsk), was a Belarusian Jewish teenage nurse and a communist martyr to the anti fascist resistance during the early years of World War II, as well as a niece of the sculptor and Soviet MP Zair Asgur. While volunteering as a nurse, she cared for wounded Red Army soldiers, and assisted them in escaping then Nazi occupied Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic. For this, she and 11 other communists of the anti fascist underground were imprisoned, tortured, and when the teenagers refused to reveal any secrets, was publicly executed by the German Wehrmacht.

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 was an avid reader and learner. She was a member of the Marxist Leninist Vladimir Lenin All Union Pioneer Organization and a member of the school committee of Komsomol, both of which were youth groups of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. In December 1938, the newspaper Pioneer of Belarus published a photograph of Masha with the caption: "Masha Bruskina the schoolgirl of 8th grade in school № 28, Minsk. She has only good and excellent marks in all subjects". In June 1941, Maria Bruskina graduated from Minsk secondary school № 28.

For decades after the war, Bruskina was officially referred to only as "the unknown girl", allegedly due to antisemitism from Soviet authorities. Up until 2009, Bruskina's name was not acknowledged on the memorial plaque at the execution site. In 2009, however, a new memorial plaque at the execution site was installed. The Russian inscription now reads "Here on October 26, 1941 the Fascists executed the Soviet patriots K. I. Truss, V. I. Sherbateyvich and M. B. Bruskina". Bruskina was first recognized in the 1960s, as most of her family and friends had been killed in the Minsk Ghetto. A monument for Bruskina was erected in HaKfar HaYarok in Israel, and a street was named after her in Jerusalem.