Kirowwerk
Portnova was born in Leningrad on 20 February 1926. She was the daughter of a working-class Belarusian family. Her father worked at the Kirov Plant. She was a seventh-grade student at the 385th school in Leningrad in 1941, when she left for her grandmother's house in the Vitebsk region. Not long afterwards, Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union. An incident with the invading Nazi troops, who hit her grandmother while they were confiscating the cattle, led her to hate the Germans.