Posts by Shelly Sanders
SHURA ERENSTEINE: A Jewish Sniper Who “wanted to meet the enemy at close quarters”
Between 350,000 and 500,000 Jews served in the Red Army in WWII, or The Great Patriotic War, as it was called in Russia, an estimate provided by ‘Jews in the Red Army, 1941-1945’, a research project conducted by The International Institute for Holocaust Research at Yad Vashem (The World Holocaust Remembrance Center), in Israel. Just…
Read MoreNina Petrova: The only grandmother-sniper in WWII
Nina Petrova was 48 years old when Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, far beyond the age of conscription. Yet Nina, who’d raised her daughter on her own and was now a grandmother, clearly considered age as insignificant when it came to combat. She joined the Red Army as a sniper of the 284th…
Read MoreLIDA BAKIEVA: LOYAL UNTIL THE END
Lida Bakieva’s loyalty, raw determination, quick thinking and sense of humor made her a sniper to fear and admire. This dark-featured young woman from Kazakhstan was just seventeen when she married nineteen-year-old Satai Bakiev a few months before the war. Satai was conscripted as soon as the Germans invaded Russia. Lida, a Young Communist League…
Read MoreROZA SHANINA: Unseen Terror of East Prussia
Oh, this army life, they all think we’re a bunch of prostitutes, and it’s so offensive for a modest girl to see all this. -Roza Shanina, November 18, 1944 Of all the female snipers I came across while working on The Night Sparrow, Roza Shanina has resonated most with her remarkable fortitude and with the…
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