Posts by Shelly Sanders
How Amelia Earhart’s Legacy Inspired the NIGHT WITCHES
It’s October 2026 and I’m watching live feed of an expedition in search of Amelia Earhart’s lost plane. For years, I’ve been intrigued by the mystery of Earhart’s disappearance over the Pacific Ocean, July 2, 1937 during her attempt to be the first woman to circumnavigate the world. Now, I feel like I’m on the…
Read MorePolina Gelman: An Inspiring Jewish Navigator in The Night Witches Who Never Gave Up!
Despite being told she was too short to fly in 1938, Polina (Lina) Gelman became one of the most skilled navigators in the Night Witches regiment. With the help of cushions behind her back, and wood blocks on the rudder pedals, Polina (who was not even five feet tall) completed 860 missions, dropped 113 tons…
Read MoreJewish Sisters in The Night Witches: Only 1 Survives
Meri and Ida Zhukovitskaya were from a large Jewish family in Ekaterinoslav, on the west bank of the Dnieper River (Today, it’s Dnipro, Ukraine). Meri, two years older than Ida, was born in 1918. By the time Ida came along, in 1920, the city’s Jewish population was nearing 40 percent. Ekaterinoslav was located within the…
Read MoreMargarita Kotikovskaya: A Jewish Sniper Who Uncovered the Fate of 800 POW’s
On a rainy spring day in 1942, Margarita Kotikovskaya, a Jewish woman from the Odessa Oblast (administrative region) emerged from a dugout at a Red Army regimental command post, clutching her forage cap in her hands. A fourth-year law student at Leningrad University when Germany invaded the Soviet Union, Margarita had been called up to…
Read MoreNatalya Kovshova and Mariya Polivanova: Female Snipers Loyal to the End
My dearest Mama! Please don’t be angry that I didn’t write to you about being wounded. But I didn’t want to worry you for no reason, since nothing serious happened… –letter from Sniper Natasha Kovshova to her mother, July 7, 1942 On a hot, sultry mid-August afternoon, Private Natasha (Natalya) Koshova, a pretty 22-year-old sniper…
Read More80 Years Ago, The First Female Snipers in Combat Were Erased From History. On the Cusp of VE Day & Mother’s Day, it’s time to amend the historical record.
Nina Petrova, a 48 year-old grandmother-sniper, proved that age is an attitude not a barrier. It’s less than a week until the 80th Anniversary of Victory in Europe Day (VE Day), when Germany officially surrendered after the Red Army stormed into Berlin. Although WWII’s western front has been well documented, there is a lesser-known yet…
Read MoreBrave Ukrainian female snipers are following in the legendary footsteps of ‘Lady Death’.
With the intersection of Women’s History Month and the US government’s shocking decision to stop funding Ukraine’s war efforts against Russia, it’s time we remember legendary WWII female Ukrainian sniper, Lyudmila Pavlichenko, and celebrate today’s female snipers fighting for Ukraine. I came across Lyudmila while researching female snipers for my upcoming novel, The Night Sparrow;…
Read MoreKlavdiya Kalugina: The Youngest Female Sniper in the Red Army
Klavdiya Kalugina was not only the youngest female sniper in the Red Army during WWII, she also had more difficulty shooting than the other cadets. Just fifteen years old when Germany invaded the Soviet Union, she joined the Komsomol (Communist Youth League) with an eye to leaving her job as a munitions factory worker and…
Read MoreAliya Moldagulova: An Unlikely Sniper Heroine
By the time Aliya Moldagulova was eight years old, in 1933, she was practically an orphan. Her mother and brother had died, and her father was a prisoner of the Soviet regime where he was being persecuted for being the son of a nobleman. For a year, Aliya wandered her small, impoverished village on the…
Read MoreSara (Shura) Erenshtein: A Tribute to a Latvian Jewish Sniper from her daughter, Fira Erenshtein
When the Germans invaded Latvia in 1941, few Jews left Riga—their news had been censored for years so they didn’t know how the Nazis were treating Jews elsewhere in Europe. Sara Erenshtein, however, fled Riga for Uzbekistan on the last available train with her parents, four siblings, and three nieces and nephews. Her mother, one…
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