When Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, the attack achieved near-total tactical surprise. Much of the Soviet Air Force was destroyed on the ground, and German units encircled millions of Soviet soldiers.
As the German Army advanced deep into Soviet territory, SS and police units followed. The first to arrive were the Einsatzgruppen, the Nazi mobile death squads that carried out mass shootings of Jews, Communists, and others deemed dangerous to German rule.
On September 19, 1941, German forces entered Kiev, the capital of Ukraine. Among the Ukrainians who chose to remain and fight the occupiers was a young woman who would kill more than 30 Nazis. Her name was Tatiana Markus.
Tatiana Yosipovna Markus was born on September 21, 1921, in Romny, then part of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. She was one of six children of Jewish parents.
A few years after her birth, the family moved to Kiev. In 1938, after finishing nine classes of secondary school, Markus began working as a secretary in the personnel department of the Southwestern Railways, which administered railway infrastructure and rail transport in Ukraine.
The Second World War began on September 1, 1939, when Nazi Germany invaded Poland. Less than two years later, on Sunday, June 22, 1941, Germany invaded the Soviet Union under the code name Operation Barbarossa.
At that time, Tatiana was working at a tramway and trolleybus park in Kishinev, the capital of Moldova, where she had been sent in the summer of 1940. The fleet was managed by Georgi Levitsky, who became her lover.
After Kishinev was seized by the Romanians, who joined the invasion alongside the Germans, Tatiana and Georgi returned to Kiev. The city was occupied by Germany from September 1941.
Before the invasion, some 160,000 Jews lived in Kiev, about 20 percent of the capital's population. After Operation Barbarossa began, roughly 100,000 Jews fled the city or were already serving in the Soviet military.
By the time the Germans occupied Kiev, about 60,000 Jews remained. Most were women, children, the elderly, the ill, or those unable or unwilling to flee earlier.
Tatiana was among those who decided to stay. Her brothers went to the front, and other family members were hastily evacuated.
To persuade her to leave, Tatiana's father, Yosif Markus, returned to the capital. He did not succeed, and the two began to take part in underground activities.
One reason Tatiana did not want to leave was that she had fallen deeply in love with Georgi Levitsky, who had by then joined the resistance. When she sabotaged German plants or killed their men, it was Levitsky who covered for her and brought the matter to an end.
Her most famous act of resistance came a few days after the Nazi occupation of Kiev began. Tatiana joined a crowd gathered to greet a German military unit, then welcomed the soldiers by tossing them a grenade hidden in a bunch of flowers. She killed four soldiers this way.
A German tank opened fire on the crowd but was soon hit by a second grenade thrown by Tatiana's father. Molotov cocktails thrown by other underground members followed. Twenty Nazis died in total, and the underground members disappeared into the crowd.
Some weeks later, Tatiana's father was identified as a Jew and shot in the Babi Yar ravine outside Kiev. Approximately 100,000 Jews, as well as Roma people, Communists, Soviet prisoners of war, and resistance fighters, were murdered there during the German occupation.
After her father's death, Tatiana became more deeply involved in the resistance. She took the alias Tanya Markusyd, the daughter of a Georgian prince killed by the Bolsheviks.
With this tragic but fake backstory, she pretended to hate the Soviet Union and to support the Germans. Using the Markusyd identity as cover, she infiltrated the highest levels of the Nazi military offices and SS commands in Kiev.
The trust the Germans placed in her allowed her to gather information about Nazi infiltrators in the resistance and to continue sabotage. German officers were drawn to her beauty, and one of her tasks was to seduce them.
They flirted with her and invited her on dates. She complied in order to poison some of them herself, lure them to apartments where underground members were waiting, or kill them after leading them into isolated areas.
The weapons and uniforms of the killed Germans were taken away, as they were needed for underground work. When she was hired to work in the officers' canteen, she systematically added poison to their food. Several officers died, but Markus escaped suspicion.
When someone in a crowd recognized her as a Jew, she would slap the person and defiantly say, "I am the daughter of a Georgian Prince."
At one point, a German officer was sent to Kiev specifically to find and destroy the underground organization in which she worked. The man from Berlin was found shot dead in his apartment after a mysterious stranger visited him several evenings in a row. The stranger was Tatiana.
One of Tatiana's last victims was an officer named Fukat, killed in his apartment. Her final task was to kill the traitor and Gestapo agent Mironovich.
She arrived at Mironovich's apartment earlier than the appointed time. Wine and food were already on the table. Mironovich began cutting bread and asked Tatiana to help.
She approached him, and when he bent down, she shot him in the back of the head. She then placed a note in the dead man's tunic reading, "The same fate awaits all of you fascists. Tanya Markus."
The reason she left the note may have been that her lover, Georgi Levitsky, had been killed the day before. Tatiana suffered a nervous breakdown.
Because of the note, the Germans knew who to look for, and Tatiana was forced to hide for some time. She stayed in an apartment on Lviv Square, and then the resistance decided to withdraw her from the city and send her to the countryside to join the partisans.
On August 22, 1942, while attempting to cross the Dnieper River, the underground fighters were stopped by coast guard police. Having jumped ashore, Tatiana tried to escape and ran to a house to hide, but the villagers handed her over to the Gestapo.
Tatiana, who had killed 33 Germans and their collaborators, was interrogated and tortured for five months. The Germans tried to extract information about resistance members, their activities, and partisan bases of support.
The abuse intensified after the Germans learned she was Jewish. According to eyewitnesses, Tatiana was beaten until she passed out, revived with water, and beaten again. A red-hot iron was put on her face and chest, her hair and nails were torn out, and her breasts were cut off.
Despite five months of brutal torture, she gave her captors no names or information. The Gestapo could not even discover her real identity, still calling her the Georgian national Tanya Markusyd.
In late 1942, the Gestapo tried to intimidate captured resistance fighters by throwing Tatiana Markus into their cell. The severely mutilated Tatiana whispered to them that no matter how they hurt her, and no matter how they would hurt her further, she would not tell them anything. Her words only strengthened the prisoners' will.
Tatiana Markus was killed on January 29, 1943. She was only 21 years old. According to some accounts, her body was thrown into the Babi Yar ravine, where more than 100,000 people, including her father, were massacred by the Germans between September 1941 and November 1943.
When Soviet forces liberated Kiev, the Second World War in Europe ended on May 8, 1945. But it took decades for Tatiana's bravery to be officially recognized.
The Soviet authorities ignored her heroic acts because she was Jewish. Only after the downfall of the Soviet Union was Tatiana finally acknowledged.
On September 21, 2006, she received the title Hero of Ukraine, with a golden star for personal courage, heroic self-sacrifice, and invincibility of spirit in the fight against fascist invaders in the Great Patriotic War of 1941 to 1945.
Three years later, in December 2009, a monument to Tatiana was opened at Babi Yar. In September 2011, a postage stamp dedicated to her was issued.