Painful Execution of Tetyana Markus *Warning REAL FOOTAGE JJ

Kiev, occupied Ukraine. A young woman walks into a German officer’s apartment. Wine is on the table. Bread is being cut. He bends over the loaf. She raises a pistol and fires one shot into the back of his skull. Then she pins a note to his tunic. The same fate awaits all of you fascists. Tanya Marcusizede. She was 20 years old.

She was Jewish. And by the time the Gestapo finally caught her, she had already killed more than 30 Nazis and their collaborators with her own hands. This is the true story of Tetyana Marcus, the underground assassin the Germans never saw coming. The girl they tortured for 5 months without breaking, and the hero of Ukraine whose name they tried to erase.

Welcome to Untold War Story. If you believe forgotten heroes deserve to be remembered, hit like right now, subscribe, and turn on notifications. We bring you the buried chapters of World War II that textbooks skipped. Drop a comment and tell us where you’re watching from. Your support keeps these stories alive. Now, let’s go back to the summer the world changed. June 22nd, 1941.

Operation Barbarossa. 3 million German and Axis troops smash across the Soviet border. Stalin’s regime had ignored repeated Western warnings. The Red Air Force is largely destroyed on the ground. Entire Soviet armies are encircled and forced to surrender. Behind the Wehrmacht come the Einsatzgruppen, mobile killing squads tasked with murdering Jews, communists, and anyone marked as a threat to long-term German rule.

On September 19th, 1941, German forces enter Kiev. Before the war, roughly 160,000 Jews lived in the city, about 1/5 of the population. After the invasion began, around 100,000 fled or were already in the Red Army. When the Germans arrived, approximately 60,000 Jews remained, mostly women, children, the elderly, the sick, and those who could not or would not leave.

Among those who stayed was a 20-year-old Jewish woman named Tetiana Iosypivna Marcus. She was born on September 21st, 1921 in Romny, then part of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, one of six children. The family later moved to Kyiv. After finishing 9 years of school in 1938, she worked as a secretary in the personnel department of the Southwestern Railways.

In the summer of 1940, she was sent to Kishinev, then under Soviet control, to work in a tram and trolleybus depot. There she fell in love with Georgi Levitsky, the man who managed the fleet. When Romanian forces, fighting alongside Germany, seized the city, Tetiana and Georgi made their way back to Kyiv just as German occupation tightened its grip.

Her brothers went to the front. Most of the family was evacuated. Her father, Joseph Marcus, returned specifically to persuade his daughter to leave. She refused. Love for Georgi, who had joined the resistance, was one reason. Something harder and colder was the other. She intended to fight. What followed is one of the most audacious underground campaigns of the entire Eastern Front.

Days after the Germans entered Kyiv, a crowd gathered to watch a military unit pass. A pretty young woman stepped forward with a bouquet of flowers. She tossed it. Inside the flowers was a grenade. Four German soldiers died instantly. A tank opened fire on the crowd. Her father hurled a second grenade and disabled it.

Other underground members threw Molotov cocktails. Roughly 20 Nazis were killed. The attackers melted back into the civilians. Weeks later, Joseph Marcus was identified as a Jew and shot at Babi Yar, the ravine on the edge of Kiev where in just 2 days at the end of September 1941, more than 33,000 Jews were murdered and where the total death toll of Jews, Roma, Soviet POWs, communists, and resistance fighters would eventually climb past 100,000.

After her father’s murder, Tatiana went deeper underground. She adopted a new identity, Tanya Marcusitze, daughter of a Georgian prince supposedly killed by the Bolsheviks. The story was pure fiction, but it worked. She presented herself as an anti-Soviet aristocrat. German officers believed her. They invited her into their circles.

They trusted her with access. Her beauty became a weapon. Officers flirted. They asked her out. She accepted. Some she poisoned herself. Others she led to apartments where resistance fighters waited. Still others she killed in isolated spots after luring them away. Weapons and uniforms taken from the dead were handed over to the underground, critical tools for further operations.

When she obtained work in an officer’s canteen, she systematically poisoned food. Several officers died. She walked away unsuspected. If anyone in a crowd recognized her as Jewish, she slapped them across the face and declared, loud enough for everyone to hear, “I am the daughter of a Georgian prince.” One German officer was sent from Berlin specifically to smash the Kiev underground.

After several evening visits from a mysterious young woman, he was found shot dead in his apartment. The visitor was Tatiana. One of her final high-value targets was Obersturmführer Karl Schtukart, killed in his own quarters. Her last assigned kill was a traitor and Gestapo agent named Mironovich. She arrived early.

Food and wine were already laid out. He began cutting bread and asked her to help. When he bent forward, she shot him in the back of the head. Then she left the note that would become legend. The same fate awaits all of you fascists. Tanya Marcusidze. The day before, her lover Georgiy Lewicki had been killed. Grief and rage may have made her reckless.

The signature on the note told the Gestapo exactly whom to hunt. She went into hiding, first in an apartment on Lviv Square, then attempting to leave the city to join partisan units in the countryside. On August 22nd, 1942, while trying to cross the Dnieper, the group was stopped by coast guard police.

Tatyana jumped ashore and ran. She tried to hide in a house. Local villagers turned her over to the Gestapo. She was 20 years old. She had personally killed 33 Germans and collaborators. What followed was 5 months of systematic torture. The Germans wanted names, safe houses, partisan bases, the structure of the key of underground.

When they discovered she was Jewish, the violence intensified. Eyewitnesses later described beatings until she lost consciousness, water thrown on her to revive her, then more beatings. Hot iron applied to her face and body, hair and nails torn out, extreme physical mutilation. She gave them nothing.

Not a single name, not a single location, not even her real identity. To the end, the Gestapo files still listed her as the Georgian national Tanya Marcusidze. In late 1942, the Gestapo threw her, barely recognizable, into a cell with other captured resistance fighters to break their morale. The mutilated young woman whispered, “No matter how they hurt me, no matter how they are going to hurt me further, I will not tell them anything.

” The prisoners later said her words steeled their own resolve. On January 29th, 1943, Tetiana Marcus was executed. She was 21 years old. According to some accounts, her body was dumped into Babi Yar, the same ravine that had already [clears throat] taken her father and tens of thousands of others. Soviet forces would not liberate Kyiv until November 1943.

The war in Europe would not end until May 8th, 1945. For decades, the Soviet authorities largely ignored her. Her Jewish identity made her an inconvenient hero in the official narrative. Only after the collapse of the Soviet Union did full recognition come. On September 21st, 2006, what would have been her 85th birthday, Tetiana Marcus was posthumously awarded the title Hero of Ukraine with the Order of the Gold Star for personal courage, heroic self-sacrifice, and invincibility of spirit in the fight against the fascist

invaders. She remains the only woman to receive that highest Ukrainian honor specifically for her World War II resistance record. On December 1st, 2009, a monument to her was unveiled at Babi Yar. In September 2011, Ukraine issued a postage stamp in her honor. The statue shows a young woman with clenched fists, not a passive victim, but a fighter.

Think about what she actually did. A Jewish secretary in her early 20s operating alone and with small cells inside a city crawling with SS, Gestapo, and Wehrmacht troops after the largest single massacre of the Holocaust’s early phase had already happened on the edge of that same city. She walked into the enemy’s social world wearing a fabricated aristocratic identity.

She used charm as camouflage and turned every dinner invitation into a potential death sentence for the men who thought they owned Kyiv. She poisoned canteens. She delivered grenades and flowers. She left calling cards on corpses. And when they finally had her, after 5 months of torture designed to shatter body and mind, she still refused to give them a single comrade. That is not Hollywood.

That is the historical record. Historians of the Soviet partisan and underground movements note that women made up a meaningful share of resistance fighters, often as messengers, scouts, and saboteurs, sometimes as direct combatants. Jewish women who stayed behind in occupied cities faced a double death sentence, as Jews under Nazi racial policy and as enemies of the occupation.

Most who remained in Kyiv after September 1941 did not survive. Tetiana chose a third path. She hunted the hunters. Her story also exposes the ugly politics of memory. For half a century, the Soviet state preferred heroes who fit a cleaner ideological mold. A Jewish girl who operated with seduction, poison, and personal vengeance complicated the official Great Patriotic War narrative.

Only independent Ukraine finally placed her statue where it belonged, at Babi Yar, among the murdered, fist raised. When you walk through that park today, you can still find her monument among the other memorials. A young woman in bronze, clenched hands. The inscription simple and absolute, Hero of Ukraine.

There is a reason this story still hits like a punch 80 years later. It is not only the body count, it is the refusal, refusing to evacuate, refusing to hide her rage, refusing to break under torture, refusing, even in the cell, to let the others see her defeated. And the final, almost theatrical act of signing her work, knowing it would cost her everything, because the man she loved was already dead, and she wanted the fascists to know a Jewish girl from Kyiv was coming for them.

The note she left on Moranovich’s body was not just a threat. It was a signature on an entire campaign. 33 dead, one false identity that fooled the occupation apparatus for months, five months of silence under torture, execution at 21, recognition delayed for 63 years. That is the measure of Tetyana Marcus. If this story reached you, if you felt the weight of what one young woman did against an entire killing machine, then do two things right now.

First, like this video. It tells the algorithm that forgotten resistance stories matter. Second, subscribe to Untold War Story and hit the bell. We dig up the chapters that were buried, sanitized, or ignored. The assassins, the saboteurs, the ordinary people who chose to fight when the world told them to die quietly.

Comment below. Had you ever heard the name Tetyana Marcus before today? And tell us which Untold War Story you want us to cover next. We read every comment. This channel exists because these names deserve to be spoken out loud in 2026, the same way they should have been spoken in 1943. Tetyana Marcus was 21 years old when they killed her.

She never told them a single name. She never stopped fighting. And now you know who she was. Thank you for watching. Stay curious. Stay fierce. We’ll see you in the next one, only on Untold War Story.